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 an excerpt of the wisdom, coming right from the pages of that book:
Do You Have a License to Date?
Our culture tends to approach dating a lot like learning to ride a bike. It’s a rite of passage. It’s part of growing up. And frankly, if you ever want to learn, you have to just get out there and try it.
Scrapes and bruises are considered normal and are expected to heal in time. And if you fall? You get back up and try again.
Actually, in practice, dating is treated even more casually than learning to ride a bike. After all, any parent letting little Bobby mount a bicycle without a helmet today could have a team of child service agents swarm in with a sting operation within minutes.
In contrast, with dating there is nothing like a helmet to guard your head, nothing like training wheels to keep you steady, and no one with you or even watching you in case you fall. The way dating is practiced in our culture, you’re sent on your way with almost no instruction, completely on your own, and largely unprotected. Does this sound like a winning plan for dating success?
The Cold Hard Reality of Dating
To be accurate, dating is far more like learning to drive a car than learning to ride a bike.
It is a rite of passage, but it is also dangerous because you’re not merely risking your knees and elbows when you fall. Instead…
When you’re dating, you’re putting your heart out there to potentially be bruised and battered. Many feel negative dating experiences leave their heart feeling “totaled.”
In addition to greater danger, there’s greater difficulty. Far from a bike ride in the park, negotiating a dating relationship can be as complicated as navigating rush hour traffic on an eight-lane highway. Blindfolded.
In short, like learning to drive a car, dating is both a dangerous and complicated endeavor. That’s why it’s not so easy to just get back up again after you fall out of love (or someone falls out of love with you). A broken heart isn’t equivalent to a skinned knee. It takes more than a Band-aid.
So in a way, you could say you ought to have to obtain a license before you date. But you don’t. You just jump behind the wheel and start driving. However, dating without a license (i.e., without any training or understanding of what you’re doing) is directionless at best and dangerous at worst.
Do You Know Where You Want Your Dating Life to Take You?
Think back in time to your last family road trip with the parental units, I’m going to guess your parents (and maybe even you) knew the following before you ever left town:
- Where you were going
- How you were going to get there
- Where you were going to stay
- What you might do while you were there
- How your vacation would be funded
In light of that, let me ask you this: “When it comes to dating, do you know where you’re going?”
For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. —Luke 14:28-32 NASB
Isn’t your future marriage a bigger deal than a family road trip? Don’t you want to build something through your dating life that you can complete, and which will stand the test of time? Isn’t it as important for you to succeed in marriage as it would be for a king to succeed in war?
If so, then where would you like your dating life to take you?
- Into a relationship with a significant other?
- Into a relationship with a “roommate with benefits”?
- All the way to marriage? Any marriage? What kind of marriage?
Don’t date directionless! If you want a successful dating life, you have to know where you want your dating life to take you.
What’s Really at Stake When You Date?
According to scripture, King Solomon was the wisest man to ever live (other than the God-man, Jesus).
God gave Solomon a once-in-a-lifetime genie-in-a-bottle offer: “Ask whatever you wish.”
And Solomon answered, “Wisdom, please.”
And God said (loosely translated), “You got it, Solo. And because I’m so pleased with your request, I’m giving you wealth and fame to go with it.”
But do you know what happened to Solomon in his later years?
Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father. —1 King 11:1-4 ESV (emphasis mine)
The “heart” is mentioned five times in these four verses, with three of those references revealing how the women whom Solomon loved “turned his heart away” from the Lord. According to Strong’s Concordance, the Hebrew word for “heart” in this passage has a broad meaning encompassing the “inner man, mind, will, heart, soul, understanding.”
Have you thought about how precious your heart is? As your blood-pumping organ is essential to life, so your metaphorical heart is the central core of who you are:
- Your feelings (including all your hopes and fears, joys and regrets)
- Your will (including all your desires and convictions)
- Your intellect (including all your thoughts and questions)
Your heart—that is what you risk every time you date. Even when you’re thinking, What the hay. I’ll just give this person a chance. No one can predict when they will fall in love. No one.
Do you think risking your heart is a small thing?
Apparently, the wisest man in the world once thought the same. However, true to God’s warning, when Solomon chose to give his heart to women who did not follow the God of scriptures, bad things happened. Really bad things. And not just for Solomon, but for the entire nation of Israel.
Think you have your heart in hand? You can’t forget you also risk the heart of everyone you date as well. Aren’t their hearts as precious as yours? Then let me encourage you to date accordingly.
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.
[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. Or watch this video and THEN click the previous link.]
