We need to recognize that there is no good thing that the Lord will withhold from those whose walk is blameless. If we are not involved in a dating relationship, if we do not have a special other person, there's no need for panic.
God makes everything beautiful in His time. Today on Focus on the Family, Pastor Alistair Begg offers encouragement and a good dose of humor along the way. Your host is Focus president and author Jim Daly.
I'm John Fuller. John, we're concluding a two-part message for singles today. It was given to college students, but let me tell you, biblical truth applies at any stage of life, so singles of any age will get a lot out of this program. Alistair started last time with a list of what a woman should look for if she wants a godly husband.
So let me recap those points. He said he should be committed to growing in his relationship with Jesus Christ. He should be a man of obvious integrity. He should also be a man who demonstrates servant leadership. And today we'll finish the list for women, and then Alistair will give men some ideas of what they should be looking for in a godly wife.
And with that, here's Alistair Begg, the pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio. And as you said, Jim, he's working through that list of characteristics of a godly husband as we continue on Focus on the Family. Fourthly, you need to look for a husband who displays the ability to love sacrificially, to love sacrificially. Seek out men who display a self-sacrificial dimension, not a person who says, well, one of the things I'd like to mention to you is that I'm a very self-sacrificing person. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Sorry, take that one off your resume. Organize is detected in subtle ways that vary from person to person. For example, watch at the end of an evening with friends to see if this character is quick to organize and spearhead the cleanup or whether he just waits for everybody else to clean up. Observe the way he relates to children and to strangers. See if he possesses a willingness to hold doors for passersby with full arms. Watch his attitude to waitresses and to other people who are involved in serving the public. Watch his eyes as he sits in a cafe and observes the obvious ravages of AIDS in the body of the young man behind the counter.
And in these things you begin to find out what you're dealing with. Unincidentally and in passing, gentlemen, married gentlemen, when is the last time that any one of us did anything for our wives that would fit clearly, solidly under the category of self-abnegation? Fifthly, a husband should be able to laugh heartily. Humor is a vital element in preventing marital failure. The ability to laugh doesn't mean that he's the class clown or even a joke teller. In fact, he may be hopeless at telling jokes. That may be the funniest part about him. Constantly turning to you and saying, what was that punch line again?
Finishing his jokes just to be met by vacant stairs. But it is important that he likes to laugh. And a key trait to look for is his willingness to laugh at himself. If he takes himself too seriously, look out. Listen carefully to him, not necessarily when he's on show, but can he tell us a story where someone else is obviously the hero where he comes off looking foolish? Is he willing to reveal pictures to you of the time when he was less handsome with his teeth protruding and his ears sticking out? Actually, as you think about it, very similar to what he is right now. When he laughs at the comic misfortunes of others, is he able to laugh without being crude and unkind and cruel? Humor is vital.
It's way up on the top of my list. If you've ever read Ragman and Other Cries of Faith by Walt Wengrin, I think his name is, he tells how he and his wife lived in a small apartment when they were first married. And when they had disagreements, as they apparently frequently did, the standard pattern was he would storm out of the door of the apartment and walk around the block one or two times until he cooled down and then he would come back. On one occasion, as the disagreement erupted, he grabbed his coat and stormed out of the door, slamming the door behind him.
It was raining outside, coming down in buckets. And as he went to move from the door, he realized he jammed his coat in the door and slammed it shut. So he had two options. One, slip your coat off and walk in the rain for two blocks without it, or ring the bell and wait for his wife to open the door.
It's an interesting choice, isn't it? What would you have done? Anyway, he rang the bell. His wife opened the door and she was laughing uncontrollably because she had seen the bit of his coat sticking in the back of the door.
She knew exactly what had happened. She's waiting for the bell to ring. The bell rings, the door opens, and she's just dissolved in laughter. And in that moment, he writes, I could simply have laughed with her and humor would have provided the bridge to reconciliation, but I refused to do so.
I gathered up my coat and I walked off into the rainy evening, a prisoner of my own refusal to laugh. Sixthly, and there are only six, a husband should model genuine humility. Simply put, a good husband shouldn't be stuck on himself. Genuine humility keeps its focus on others.
You need to watch and see if the other person can share the joy of a competitor's success. If you find yourself in the company of somebody who cannot be an understudy, who can't sit in the second chair, who can't play second fiddle, who's always got to be the theme of the story, the joke of the party, the success of the event, I want to suggest to you girls that you might want to take a long, hard look at whether you're in the company of the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. Okay, fellas, here we go.
What do we look for in a wife? Number one, tall, two, thin, three, no, sorry. Sorry, sorry.
I couldn't resist that. That's terrible. Number one, it's the same as number one. For the husband, it's obvious a good wife must have a personal faith and trust in the Lord Jesus. It is the basis for any and all of the other qualities on the list. I can't overstate for you the importance of ensuring that you don't enter into an intimate relationship where one person is a Christian and the other is not. The Bible is clear, don't get unequally yoked. To be unequally yoked is to be unable to pull together. That means there are two divergent standards, two opposite goals, two radically different interpretations of life, two incompatible masters to serve, two contrary powers at work, one belief. Allied with belief in Jesus means just one thing. There can be no real intimacy in matters that really count.
The two cannot pull together because they are not truly together. And so Paul commands believers to marry, 1 Corinthians 7, 39, only in the Lord. And in the course of 27 years of pastoral ministry, I've watched and experienced empathetically the sadness of girls who got themselves way committed into something and felt unable to extricate themselves. They thought that they could evangelize Him.
They thought that they could bring Him round. I sat with them and said, if He's not about to bow before your Savior while He doesn't have your hand in marriage, do you think He's going to do when you marry Him? Oh yes, I'm sure He promised me that when we get married and so on it goes. And I've had occasion just to sit and say to the girl, you can either cry now or you can cry later.
You can cry now because you've lost Him or you can cry later because you've got Him. And the same is true for a fellow if he is going to anticipate anything other than a godly wife. Secondly, we need to look for a wife who possesses beauty that is deeper than the skin, deeper than the skin. I don't know of anyone who sets out to find a spouse who's physically unattractive, but the importance of a gentle and a quiet spirit is almost unquantifiable. A wise fellow looks for a woman who possesses a natural radiance rather than a glow that comes from a bottle.
It is less important to find a woman whose beauty comes from time spent in front of a beauty parlor than from time spent in the presence of the Lord Jesus. I recall walking on the beach with the man who turned out to be my father-in-law. We were at a place called Rehoboth. I've never been there since.
I remember going there and perhaps in Maryland, I don't know. And his daughter, one of four daughters, was out swimming in the water on the shore, and I was walking along with him. He liked me, but not a lot.
I think he wanted to keep all of his daughters safely in America and get rid of me and anybody like me. And as we reached the spot where she was swimming, she came out of the water and she walked towards us. She tossed her head back and her hair, and he turned to me and he said, what a beautiful girl, inside and outside. The inside is the key.
The outside is the bonus. Thirdly, you need to look for a wife who is an initiative taker with an attitude of submission, an initiative taker with an attitude of submission. This simply parallels what we said previously about a man being a sacrificial leader. Any wise fellow is looking for a woman with ideas, abilities, hopes, plans, gifts, dreams, the whole panorama of abilities that she brings to marriage. Because in entering into marriage in more areas than we're prepared to admit, we as the husbands will be dependent upon their knowledge, upon their insight, upon their courage, upon their faith, upon their expertise. So when I hear a noise in the night downstairs, I have a very brave wife for which I'm thankful. You may be the kind of guy that immediately runs down the stairs and takes care of it. I'm the kind of guy that wakes her up and says, honey, there's a noise. And after all these years, she knows what that means. She dutifully gets out of bed, takes me by the hand and we go down the stairs together. I am unashamedly dependent upon her, not only there.
The word submission is so frequently understood, it's become a sensitive issue for many people. It's not uncommon for girls to tell me that they're not going to say that part in their vows. Incidentally, anyone who does, I tell them get married by somebody else because I'm not going to marry you. And that of course goes over very well with a girl's mother, but anyway, who cares? God's intended role for a wife is not to wait around for her husband's directives as somehow or another she was paralyzed without them. You don't think that Adam and Eve in the garden, Eve was sitting around with a bunch of flowers saying, what am I supposed to do with these? And Adam said, well, put the daffodils on the left, put the tulips on the right and put the begonias over here behind me.
No, he said, honey, I don't know what you do with flowers. There will seldom be a day as a man when we do not have occasion to depend on multiple levels upon the wisdom, insight, initiative, grace, courage, faithfulness, integrity, skill, giftedness of our wives. All of that said, it does not negate the fact that in the order of God's plan for marriage, the man is entrusted with the awesome responsibility of being held accountable as leader in the home. It is therefore imperative that you do not fall into the clutches of a bossy self opinionated woman who you will see it in relationship to her father. You will see it in relationship to her peers.
You will see it that she's unprepared to submit our heart and our mind and our lifestyle ultimately to the clear teaching of the word of God. The roles of husband and wife in more ways than physically are not in the Scriptures interchangeable. And therefore, certain expectations for the individual role of each other needs to be understood and worked out. Fourthly, a wife, the kind for which we look should build her husband's confidence.
Trustworthiness stems from character. A woman's intrinsic qualities are revealed by our actions. A girl knows the difference between dressing in a way that is attractive and dressing in a way that is deliberately seductive. Girls know the difference, so do we men. If you find in dating a girl that it is clear from the way she carries herself that she enjoys the possibility of creating titillation in the minds of other men who are around in the context, whether it be of the swimming pool or whether it be of the coffee shop, whatever it may be, let that be to you a gigantic warning sign. It may be an opportunity for learning and growth.
It may, however, be the occasion when you slip out the backjack. We're looking for a wife who displays kindness that touches others. Looking for a kindness that touches others. Women don't have the exclusive ownership of the characteristic of kindness, but often they do a much better job in expressing compassion than most men. It would appear, I don't think this devalues, indeed I think it exalts women to say that God has fashioned them to be capable of special tenderness.
Men are frequently intent on, keep moving, let's get going. Women are far more willing to stop in the cause of compassion. In fact, probably if you think about it, women that have marked our lives have often marked our thinking on account of their tenderness. And as our culture continues to promote effeminate men and masculine women, as Christian people we must be prepared in the face of ridicule, abuse, and possibly persecution to be unashamed in holding firm to the guidelines of Scripture when it comes to these things. There were very, very clear reasons for the Old Testament commands relating to the distinction between the sexes. And actually we do well to pay more attention to them than we're prone to do in an increasingly androgynous culture. Girls should look like girls and will always be their best when they do. And of course men should be like men. It seems almost impossible that we have to say these things, doesn't it? Finally, a wife like a husband should have a sense of humor that braves adversity.
The ability to laugh will get couples through more than a few rough spots. I think about Susan when she came to Scotland with me after we were married. First of all, I had no money.
She had a little money that she'd saved. I took all her money and we used it to get back to Scotland. We sailed on a…we cruised to London from the port of New York. Don't get any illusions about how beautiful it was.
It was horrendous. We were on a Russian sailing ship called the Mikhail Lermontov. In 1986 in Zurich, I was reading the Herald Tribune with a doctor as we headed for Kenya together. And as we sat on the plane, I saw a tiny paragraph that said, Russian motor vessel sinks off the coast of New Zealand. I put my hand over it.
I said, the Mikhail Lermontov. And then I looked down and that's exactly what it was. I don't know whether we were on its maiden voyage, but it was close.
To say that this thing was backward is an understatement. I couldn't use up your time describing how horrendous it was as I ushered my young bride lower and lower and lower into the belly of this cavernous thing. And then finally into our stateroom where you had to go in and then step back and then let the second person in.
And then at that point you were here and so were your bunk beds. And neither of us have ever done drugs except on that particular ten-day voyage. And I don't know what it was we took, but it was a combination of anything that was available from the gift shop.
Dramamine and anything that went with it. And in a semi-comatose state we celebrated our marriage. She on the top and me on the bottom and then me on the top and she on the bottom, sailing towards London, leaving America behind, leaving her family behind, leaving all those boys in Michigan behind, leaving the whole thing behind.
Do you think she's got a sense of humor? And when we finally got to the apartment that the church had set aside for us in Edinburgh, she said about the business of making a home, I told her that I had put together some furnishings, which I had got from a friend at college who was adept at picking up junk everywhere he went. And I didn't really know, but we put this, I stored furniture in a garage and we had it picked up and brought to Edinburgh.
I was gone on the day that arrived, she was not. And she had the embarrassment of standing there as two elders from the church picked these horrendous pieces of furniture off the back of this, this equivalent of a U-Haul and carried them up the stairs. And I remember coming home to her, it was maybe two or three days into this project and this furniture, there was not two pieces that matched. It seriously was uglier than anything you could ever imagine.
This stuff was bad with a capital B. And in the evening, I took it down the stairs and smashed it all to bits with a hatchet and put it out for the garbage to pick it up the following morning. Do you think my wife's got a sense of humor?
She better have. And if you're looking for a girl that can put up with your strange peculiarities, you better look for one who can laugh as well, because I've seen you, and you're pretty funny. But I want to finish with a quote, because there are people here tonight and you're saying, I don't have a boyfriend, I don't have a girlfriend.
Frankly, I'm not planning on getting one anytime in the near future. And I'm wondering whether it may be that singleness is my lot in life. Well, let me quote to you from one of my favorite singles, John Stott. What about us?
He says as singles. We too must accept the Bible's teaching however hard it may seem as being God's purpose both for us and for society. We shall not become a bundle of frustrations and inhibitions if we embrace God's standard, but only if we rebel against it.
Christ's yoke is easy, provided we submit to it. It is possible for human sexual energy to be redirected both into affectionate relationships with friends of both sexes and into the loving service of others. Alongside a natural loneliness, accompanied sometimes by acute pain, we can find joyful self-fulfillment in the self-giving service of God and other people. The chances are, you will meet your mate in the next three or four years. Do not assume that a friendship has to be more than a friendship when it begins.
Do you know how many people got married and they weren't even friends? Covenant before God that you will not add to the statistics, but God helping you, you will please Him, whether in singleness or in marriage, living according to the principles of His word. And with that, we come to the conclusion of a terrific two-part message for singles from Pastor Alistair Begg on today's episode of Focus on the Family. You know, as I listened today, I couldn't help but think of all the heartbreak and despair that could be avoided if Christians use these guidelines when considering whom they will marry.
Let me recap them quickly. They're that important. Alistair was quoting 1 Peter chapter 3, where the Apostle Peter described the character traits of a Christian husband or wife. They should display a personal faith in Jesus, inner beauty for women and integrity for men, a biblical view on servant leadership and submission, an ability to love sacrificially, kindness and humility, and a sense of humor, which I appreciate.
We'll post this list online so that you can get a copy. If you use that criteria, your chances of having a successful marriage will be greatly improved. And here at Focus on the Family, we know that a healthy marriage is a critical building block for a strong society. And in addition to our resources to help marriages thrive, we also have a vibrant outreach to singles that is simply called Boundless. Yeah, and Boundless just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Boundless outreach.
25 years, that's flown by. The Boundless and online community and podcast are designed to help singles embrace new responsibilities, own their faith, date with purpose, I like that one, prepare for marriage, and above all, honor God in everything they do. And we're very proud of the Boundless team led by Lisa Anderson. So let me ask you, can you come alongside us in this work? We are a nonprofit ministry and depend on your donations to fuel it. The best way to help us is with a monthly pledge, which really helps us even out the budget over the fiscal year. And when you make a monthly pledge of any amount, we'll send you Alistair Begg's book called Lasting Love, How to Avoid Marital Failure.
It goes way beyond what was covered in this two-part broadcast. And if you can't make a monthly commitment right now, we'll send you the book for a one-time donation of any amount. Just follow the link in the episode notes to donate to the work of Focus on the Family and request that book, Lasting Love by Alistair Begg.
You can do that online or when you call 800, the letter A in the word family. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for listening to this Focus on the Family podcast. If you would, please help us out and take a moment and leave a rating in your podcast app, and then make sure you share about this episode with a friend. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed, even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a hope restored marriage intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.
