Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): Everyone really longs for deep lasting love, but great relationships don't happen by accident. Welcome to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Today, we begin a new series called Finding and Keeping the Love of Your Life. Rick Warren will share wisdom from God's word that's practical and will help you build a healthier, stronger, Christ-centered relationship.

Whether you're single, dating, engaged, or married, this series will help you grow in love, communication, and lasting commitment. Let's get started. This will be part one of a message called Finding the Love of Your Life.

Pastor Rick Warren: In your life, two of the most important choices you're going to make are: one, will I ever get married? That's a choice. And the second one is, if I do, who's it going to be? The Bible has a lot to say about this. If you'll take out your message notes inside your program, "Finding the Love of Your Life."

The Bible says in Proverbs 12:26, "The righteous chooses his friends carefully." If you're supposed to choose your friends carefully, you should be even more careful about who's going to be your life partner. Notice it is a choice. God doesn't do this for you. God says you make the choice. The problem is nobody teaches us how to do that. You didn't get a class in school. Your parents didn't teach you how to choose the right person to marry.

As a result, many people end up in the wrong marriage for the wrong reason. As your pastor who loves you, I don't want you to do that. I don't want you to end up that way. We're going to look tonight at what the Bible says is God's checklist for choosing the right person. Before we do that, I need to dispel a couple of myths. There are a couple of myths about marriage out there and we just need to get them out of the way.

The first one is this: God doesn't choose my mate for me. It's your decision. It's your choice. God places the responsibility 100% on your shoulders. God is not going to put a sign in the sky that says, "Marry Harry." It isn't going to happen. You can look all you want, but it isn't going to happen. Some people say, "I'm not going to date, I'm just going to wait." There's a word for that: bachelor, bachelorette, or never married.

That's nonsense to say, "I'm not going to date, I'm going to wait." That's what you get when you cross a crocodile with an abalone; it's a crock of baloney. When God wants to steer you, it's easier to move a car that's moving than one that's parked. God can't move a parked car. He can't steer it. It's got to be moving, and then he can go this way or that way. You can go home and sit in your basement and say, "I'm just going to wait and not date," and nothing's going to happen.

God says it's your choice. God leads us, God guides us, and God gives us guidelines. We're going to look at them tonight, but ultimately, it's your choice. The second myth is this: there isn't only one right person for me. That's very romantic. There's only one person in the entire universe for me. Well, it's just not true. It's not only romantic, but it's not biblical. It's not even logical.

If there was only one right person for everybody in the world, it would only take one person to make a wrong decision to break the chain for everybody else, and all the dominoes would fall. Let me give you a little demonstration. Would you welcome my participants today? Come on out here, you guys. Let's put the girls over here and the guys over here. Let's say these are eight eligible bachelors and bachelorettes.

Let's say God loves you and has a wonderful man for your life, his name is Johnny. Johnny here is in orange, so obviously Johnny is supposed to hook up with Margo and marry Margo. But let's say Margo says, "No way, Johnny. I like Daniel." Margo comes over here and marries Daniel. That leaves Johnny out of luck. Johnny is not going to be able to marry the woman God planned for him. All of a sudden, he goes over here and says, "Well, Kelly, she looks wonderful."

We're going to go over here with Kelly. But Kelly was supposed to marry Jim. So now that Kelly's married Jim, who are you going to marry? He's going to marry Lauren. Which means you two guys are the leftovers. Brett and Amy, you actually get together. So one couple actually got together. See how silly this is? It doesn't work. Let's give these guys a hand. Let's say I was supposed to marry a woman named Susan. You guys can leave now, thank you.

Instead, I married Kay. Well, then all of a sudden it upsets the apple cart for everybody else on the entire planet. It is a total myth. It's romantic, but it's a myth. In your life, there are multiple people God would say, "That's okay for you to marry." God doesn't have a bullseye when it comes to marriage. Forget that there's some Miss Right or Mr. Right out there. They just aren't there. It isn't going to happen, and the Bible doesn't say that.

One other myth is love alone is not enough reason to marry. Write that down. I talk to people all the time who are getting married and I look at them and go, "There's no way." The family background isn't right, the spiritual background isn't right, the personality background isn't right, the educational background isn't right. They don't have the same amount of energy, they don't have the same amount of ambition, they don't even have the same values or goals.

None of these things are right, but they say, "We love each other!" Friend, given the right situation, I could get you to fall in love with anybody. Love is a choice. I could put you in certain circumstances that would make you romantically inclined. Just because you love someone does not mean you should marry them. I would like for us to repeat this together: "Just because you love someone doesn't mean you should marry them."

I fell in love with multiple women before I married Kay. Any of them, if I had married, would have been a disaster. You can fall in love with all kinds of people; it doesn't mean you should marry them. Love is not enough. It takes a lot of other things and that's what we're going to look at tonight. God doesn't tell you who to marry, but he does give you a description of the kind of person that he desires for you to marry.

If you want God's blessing on your marriage, which you do, and you want God's protection on your marriage, which you do, and you want success in your marriage, which you do, then you better listen to what God has to say about the kind of person you should marry. The evidence of not following what God says to do is all around us. God gives us a list, and I call these a list of "must-haves."

I'm going to give you a list tonight from the Bible of things you must have in your life and in your mate's life in order to marry them. Until these are right, you're not ready to marry them and they're not ready to marry you. They may not even ever be the right person for you to marry. You can add to this list your own experiences, but what I'm going to give you tonight is the bare minimum. These are the minimum requirements for the marriage God blesses.

If they don't meet these qualifications, it's a deal-breaker. I don't care how much I love them, I don't care how much money they've got, how cute they are, how much they make me laugh. It doesn't matter how sweet we get along together, how much we have fun, or how much we have in common. If we don't match on these things, it's a deal-breaker. This week, I celebrated my 37th anniversary. I have counseled thousands of married couples in trouble and thousands of single adults who were considering marriage.

I do know a little about what the Bible is talking about, and I just want to save you some pain. These are not my opinion; this is what God says are the requirements of the kind of person you should choose to marry. Number one: we must have spiritual unity. That means we believe the same thing about God. We have a relationship with God together. If you aren't spiritually unified with your spouse, you are never going to enjoy the depth of physical, sexual, or emotional intimacy that God desires for your marriage.

You just can't do it. You cannot have the ultimate physical, emotional, and sexual unity that God wants you to have if you're not unified in the number one area of your life, which is your relationship with God. Your relationship with God should be the biggest, most important part of your life. If I can't share the biggest, most important part of my life with my wife, we're living on different wavelengths. We've got different worldviews.

We may have all kinds of other things in common, but our marriage will be shallow our entire lives. There will be problems. Your marriage will never be as deep as it could be, and you will never experience the emotional intimacy or the sexual intimacy that God wants you to have unless you're united in spirit. There's a spiritual unity that means you're headed in the same direction. If you want God's protection on your marriage, God's got to be at the center. He's got to be the glue.

Most people have no idea how important God is to marriage. It takes more than a man and woman to make a solid marriage. Marriage was God's idea. God thought it up. God thought up sex, intimacy, family, and children. He designed it. God designed it that marriage is a three-legged stool: God, a husband, and a wife. You take out any one of the legs and the stool's going to fall over. You've got to have God in the relationship or it's going to be unstable.

God is absolutely clear about this first one. 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 14 and 15: "Stop forming inappropriate relationships with unbelievers. Can right and wrong be partners? Can light have anything in common with darkness? Can a believer share life with an unbeliever?" In other words, if you don't have spiritual unity, how in the world can you be unified in any other area? Let me have true confession right now.

As a pastor, I don't like to disappoint people. I don't like to hurt people's feelings. I want them to like me. I want them to be happy. Honestly, I can't tell you how many times people have come to me and introduced me to their fiancé. They want me to be happy about their fiancé. They start telling me all their fine qualities. Their fiancé does have a lot of great qualities. They tell me how much they love them and how much they have in common.

They tell me how much they've got similar plans and how much they think alike in so many different areas. Then one of them will take me aside and say, "There's only one problem: he's not a believer. She's not a believer. It's the only problem." Every bone in my body wants to say, "It's no big deal, go right ahead, be happy." But after watching over a thousand divorces, I'm blunt and I say, "You're making the biggest mistake of your life."

I love you enough to tell you the truth. You are making the biggest mistake of your life. If you don't have spiritual unity, you're never going to have sexual unity the way God intended. You're never going to have emotional unity the way God intended. You're never going to have unity in communication because your partner rejects the biggest area of your life. I don't care what else you've got in common; they reject that.

If you have committed your life to Christ, then there's no way you can give your life away to somebody who rejects your Savior. There's just no way you can do that. You can do it and say, "God, I don't want your blessing, your success, or your protection on my marriage. I'm going to willfully ignore what the Bible says." I used to be kind of casual about this and think you can win them to the Lord later. Missionary dating is what we call it.

People tell me all the time, "I'll win him to Christ," or "He'll change after we're married." Would you like me to give you 5,000 people who will tell you that doesn't happen? The change, if it doesn't happen before the marriage, is when the leverage is on. A lot of girls in particular, when they plan their wedding, there's a standard: walk down the aisle, stand at the altar, and then do the hymn. It's aisle-altar-hymn. People think that's how it's going to be: "I'll alter him."

It doesn't work that way. 2 Corinthians 6:14 says, "Do not unite yourself with an unbeliever. They're not fit mates for you." If you want God's best, I'm telling you right up front, don't even consider somebody who's not committed to Jesus Christ. Let me give you the hard, cold facts of life. Not preference, facts of life. A national survey reported in Marriage Magazine: one out of every two and a half marriages in America now ends in divorce.

That's not very good odds. But when a couple is spiritually unified, meaning they're both believers and they practice three habits together—attend church weekly together, pray together, and read the Bible together—the divorce rate drops from one out of every two and a half marriages to one out of every 1,105 marriages. Are you willing to gamble? Please, I'm telling you as your pastor, don't gamble the second most important decision in your life.

If you marry without spiritual unity, the odds are that in 10 years you're going to be divorced. You're not going to beat the odds, as a general rule. Or you'll stay together and your deepest intimacy will never be there. You'll live at a shallow level because you're not sharing the most important thing in your life. There's going to be conflict with your kids and all kinds of other problems. This is the starting one. I must have spiritual unity.

The Bible says in Romans 1:12, "I want us to help each other with the faith we have. Your faith will help me and my faith will help you." That's what God wants to do in marriage. He wants the faith of the husband to help the wife and the faith of the wife to help the husband. How can your faith help each other if one of you has no faith? If I were to stand on the edge and you were to come over here, is it easier for me to pull you up or for you to pull me down?

It's always easier to be pulled down in a relationship than to pull somebody up. I'm not shy about this anymore. If that offends you, I'm sorry. I'm doing what is best for your happiness. You must have spiritual unity in your marriage. Today, I want to ask you to join with Daily Hope as we focus on fulfilling the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. That's where Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've commanded you."

Sharing Jesus with others is the most important thing you can do while you're alive because you're helping people determine their destiny. If we join together, we can reach across the whole world with the message of Christ. That's why I'm asking new friends to partner with Daily Hope. By becoming a Partner in Hope, we're able to take the good news of Jesus into almost every country of the world, including regions where it's difficult or even dangerous to share the good news of the gospel.

I want to invite you to join us. Become a Partner in Hope today. With your first monthly donation, we'll send you a special gift to welcome you as a partner of the Hope family. We love you. God bless you.

Guest (Male): To become a Partner in Hope with convenient automated monthly giving, just go to pastorrick.com or text the word HOPE to 70309. When you do, we'll send you a very special welcome gift to say thank you. Again, that's pastorrick.com or just text the word HOPE to 70309. Thank you so much for your support. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God's word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.