Want to know how to date and guard your heart, avoiding needless heartbreak, rejection, and regret?
Then watch this video introducing six different LoveEd playlists produced to empower you to succeed in dating.
Then pick the LoveEd series that interests you most:
- Purpose Driven Dating*
- Dating 101*
- Stuff You Should Know Before You Date
- Hot Topics Handled with Care
- TOP10 Dumbest Reasons to Date*
- How to Flirt Like a Christian
But if you really want to date and guard your heart in a wise – NOT fearful – way, check out our Date Like You Know What You’re Doing book and video curriculum. (The book covers ALL the material contained in the playlists above followed by an *.)
Here’s just a quick bit of wisdom, coming right from the pages of that book:
What It Means to “Guard Your Heart”
Bottom line, your heart is a treasure to God. Far more precious than it ever will be to anyone you date or marry because God is our Creator who formed your heart, knows your heart, and died (literally) to win your heart for your good and His glory. This is why God commands us in Proverbs 4:23 to guard our heart.
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.
This passage is commonly interpreted to mean God doesn’t want us to risk wounding our heart. And following this line of thinking, many avoid dating seriously or even dating at all, while others wait for supernatural signs or words from God they believe will keep them from ever getting hurt in the dating process.
Worse Than the Wrong Goal
However, trying to protect your heart from all hurt is not only the wrong goal, it’s an unfeasible goal for anyone who sets out to love like Jesus. As C.S. Lewis states so clearly in The Four Loves …
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
Instead of trying to protect your heart from hurt, the writer of Proverbs is encouraging us to protect our heart from needless hurt; the kind of hurt we invite on ourselves by living foolishly. The kind of hurt King Solomon endured. Consider the three verses which precede verse 23 in Proverbs 4:
My son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body. (NIV)
The goal is not to avoid vulnerability but stupidity.
Bottom line: If you want a successful dating life, you must learn how to wisely guard your own heart, as well as the hearts of those you date. We accomplish this by keeping our hearts in the hands of our God, even while we seek His will in risking our heart by loving others, particularly by loving someone enough to enter an exclusive dating relationship.
[Again, the above post is an excerpt right from Date Like You Know What You’re Doing: Your DatePrep Guide. I wrote it to empower YOU to grow spiritually and date wisely so you can marry well. Check out the book and video curriculum here.]
