For many single people, what they don't need is a mate. What they need is a miracle. Dr. Tony Evans says faith can allow believers to ride the wave of God's will to a relationship breakthrough. They literally need the divine intervention of God to address the problem, because the natural processes of connecting have become damaged. This is the alternative broadcast featuring the timeless biblical teachings from the archives of Dr. Tony Evans. A person's character shapes many aspects of their life, and Dr. Evans says it's one of the most important qualities to consider in a prospective mate.
Let's join him as he discusses the dangers of lowering your standards and describes how God works to guide the relationships of believers who remain patient and faithful. Today we are facing a crisis of singlehood. It is not because people prefer to be single or feel called to be single. It is because we have a generation of people with no one to marry. The natural processes of mating, the natural processes of connecting, have become damaged. And so that which would be normal, boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, vice versa, they get married, has been interrupted by sin, circumstances, and secularism. So for many single people, what they don't need is a mate, what they need is a miracle.
They literally need the divine intervention of God to address the problem because the natural processes do not allow for it, and that problem will become worse before it becomes better. Might I suggest to you today that if you desire to be married and you do not feel that your singlehood is related to calling or preference, that because the natural processes have been interrupted by sin, secularism, and circumstances, that what you need is fasting and prayer. In Genesis 24, we read in verse 31, and he said, Come in, blessed of the Lord, why do you stand outside, since I have prepared the house and a place for the camels, so the man that did the house lay been unloaded the camels, he gave straw and feed to the camels, and water to wash his feet, and the feet of the men who were with him. But when food was set before him to eat, he said, I will not eat until I have told my business, I will not satisfy my body until I have seen my prayer answered. Isaac is 40 years old and either has not found any wife or most certainly has not found the right wife, Isaac is 40 years old, and Mrs. Wright, as far as he can see, has not yet come along.
And like any good mother and father who sees their 40-year-old who thinks they ought to be married by now, not married, Abraham is ticked. This leads to a process that I offer you, those who are single in particular, because the Word of God, as we have seen in this series, teaches that when you need a breakthrough, when the normal processes do not work and you need a miracle, fasting in prayer is the road to take. If you are going to fast for a mate, it will involve four things that need to come alongside of your fasting as you wait for your miracle.
First of all, fasting involves commitment to God. Abraham at the beginning of chapter 24 calls his servant, who he's going to send out to look for a wife for his son, he says at the end of verse 2, Please place your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord the God of heaven, the God of earth, that you shall not take a wife for my son from among the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I live. You shall go to my country and to my relatives and take a wife for my son Isaac. He says, I want you to swear by God. Abraham recognized that finding a wife and finding the right wife was going to take God. And so he says, I want you to swear by your commitment to God. Now, this commitment to God was covenantal. God had made a promise to Abraham, the Abrahamian covenant, that he was going to make of Abraham a great seed. Well, the question is, how can I have a great seed if my son doesn't even have a wife?
So his concern was God's person, swear by God, and God's program. Many people get married for a lot of reasons, but often unconnected to the kingdom of God. He says, I want a wife to fulfill the covenantal promise of God. I want a wife so that I can have, if I would put it in everyday language today, a Christian home. I want a maid so I can establish a model of the kingdom of God on the street where I live. He connected the miracle to the program of God.
Secondly, fasting involves not only commitment to God, but when you fast for a maid, it involves confidence in God. Look at verse seven. The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father's house and from the land of my birth, and who spoke to me and who swore to me, saying, to your descendants, I will give this land, he will send his angels before you, and you will take a wife for my sons from there. You know what he says? He says, if you follow God, he's going to lead you to the lady.
I don't know who she is, I don't know the exact location, all I know is that the Lord will lead you. That's what he assures him of. He assures him of divine guidance. He assures him to march out looking for a maid with the conviction that God will supply. And so, how do we know the servant had faith?
Because he didn't stay home. His faith was exercised. That is, he began the process of looking for the leading of God. When you are committed to God, and when you step out on faith, you're positioning yourself so that the wave of God's will can carry you to where he wants you to go. Thirdly, fasting for a maid involves character before the Lord. Not only commitment to the Lord, confidence in the Lord, but character before the Lord.
Well, look at the story, it came about before he was finished speaking. Oh, I like that. Rebecca, according to verse 15, Rebecca, who was born in Betheol, came up and the girl was very beautiful, no man had relationships with her. She went down to the spring and filled her jar, came up, the servants ran to meet her, please let me drink a little water from your jar. She said, drink my Lord. When she had finished giving him drink, she said, I will draw also from your camels until they had finished drinking. Now I want to show you four things from this passage about this woman's character.
If you want to find the right person, you must be becoming the right person. Number one, we discover she was a virgin. So she was committed to moral purity. She was not compromising sexually in order to hook up with the right one. She was not sleeping around, hoping that one of the folks she slept with would ask her to marry him. She was committed to moral purity. She was beautiful though.
She wasn't like nobody was looking for her, the text lets us know she was beautiful. Purity has a way of showing itself for. You know how they have these detergent commercials and they show you how one detergent cleans another detergent, they do the washing, then they put out the different laundry and they can always show you the one that was washed by the particular detergent that they're advertising because it's real clean.
It's real clean. There was a commitment of purity. You cannot ask God to lead you to a mate if you're swimming in the mud. You cannot ask God to lead you to a mate if you have no standards. If you're only good to be picked up, then let Satan find somebody to pick you up. But if you are a woman of dignity, of class, and of character, then you're not a piece of cloth to be used.
You are a daughter of the king to be honored. What Satan has done though, is he's taken the one tree God says you can't have and caused you to miss the 100 trees you can't have. That's what he did with Eve.
He's so focused on the one thing you can't do that she missed all the other stuff she could have been enjoying that she could do. Don't let Satan and the sex-crazed culture that we're in get you so focused on the one thing God says don't do, that you don't get to enjoy all the privileges and all the freedoms and all the experiences of what you can do under God. We'll get back to more from Dr. Evans in just a moment. First, though, if you're ready to dig deeper into the biblical principles he's been presenting today, be sure to request a copy of his two-volume series, Fasting the Key to Spiritual Victory. It explains how saying no to your physical appetite can sharpen your spiritual one, creating a hunger for God that the Lord is only too happy to satisfy. Right now, we're offering all 14 full-length messages in this series on CD or digital download as our gift when you support the ministry of the alternative. Along with the complete audio package, we'll also send you a special bonus, the Cultivating a Year of Kindness Perpetual Flip Calendar, your 365-day companion to becoming contagiously kind. These reflections will help you develop a deep passion for kindness in your daily life as you're motivated and encouraged with insights from Dr. Evans, along with short prayers and inspiring Bible passages. Visit us today at tonyevans.org or call us at 1-800-800-3222 to take advantage of this special resource package.
Again that's tonyevans.org or by phone 1-800-800-3222. Well, Dr. Evans, we'll come back with more of today's lesson right after this. If you're like most Christians, there are people in your life who know you but may not know Jesus. You really want to do something about that but don't feel equipped to share your faith effectively.
In other words, maybe if you knew more, you could do more. Well, that's where the Tony Evans Training Center comes in. It's an online Bible school with classes that will take you deep into the most important core concepts of the faith. You can start with our free introductory course on evangelism, then move on to subjects like spiritual warfare, marriage building, maturing in the faith, and many more. The content is challenging but you can move through it at your own pace anytime you're online. There's also lots of custom content from Tony and an online forum where you can get your specific questions answered.
Go to tonyevans.org and follow the link to the Tony Evans Training Center. It's like having a seminary on your smartphone. Funny of all, she offered to feed the camels as well as to feed him. There are two things there, actually. Number two is she was kind. She was kind. She was a sharing person. She was not selfish. This is my water.
You get yours. Anybody married to a woman like that cooking dinner and asking you what you're going to drink? He wanted the kind of woman who was going to be kind, sharing, unselfish. That's why he asked her who would offer the drink. But not only was she kind, she was also thirdly industrious. Camels can drink 25 gallons of water a shot.
There are 10 camels. So that's a whole lot of work. This woman was industrious, or to put it other, she was productive. And he says in verse 23, please tell me, is there room for us to lodge in your father's house? She says in verse 25, we have plenty of both straw and feed and room to lodge in. She was hospitable. He said, this is a woman of character. This is a woman of dignity.
This is a woman of kindness. Finally, fasting for a maid involves confirmation by God. He goes to a place, he tells them, I'm not going to eat till this matter is settled. And then he outlines in verse 34 and following the story that led him to her house, that God was in the process of working this out. And when they hear the story, because they too believed in the same God, Laban and Bethiel verse 50 answered and said, this matter comes from the Lord. Behold, Rebekah verse 51 is before you, take her and go. In other words, when the Lord is in it, somebody else is going to see it. If you're the only person that sees she's the right one, something's wrong. You always want other people who love the Lord to confirm it, especially other people who are part of the family who love the Lord. I'm talking about people who don't love the Lord, they don't have the same criteria.
But if they love the Lord, look for confirmation by other people who love the Lord as a way of confirming to you that this is right, which is why in the Bible, the father, a godly father always was involved in the marriage and the giving away of his daughter. It was a way of confirming it. It was confirmed by the families. But he had also said it was confirmed by the circumstances, you know, the camels and all of that and how he wind up meeting her at the well.
Now let me tell you something here. There is no word from God in this story, no direct word from God. There are no prophecies in this story. There are no unusual circumstances in this story.
You know what this is? The quiet leading of God. Sometimes God may do something graphic, but this just came because he met her at a well and he happened to ask a question about a drink and she happened to answer it right.
It was just doing the movement of the walking. The servant says, I would like permission to take her back. And they said, take her and go. Verse 24. Her brother and her mother said, let the girl, verse 55, stay with us a few days.
Say 10. Then she can go. But he said, do not delay me since the Lord is in this. The Lord has prospered it.
This is God at work. Don't delay it. Verse 57, we shall consult the girl and ask her her wishes.
You see, because you never get so involved in the marriage of somebody you love that you skip what they want. And they called Rebecca and said, will you go with this man? And she says, I will go. Now what's the problem in this story?
Help me somebody. She has not met the man. She doesn't know who Isaac is. But because she knows God and because she's close to God and because she knew God was in it, she said, I will go. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field toward evening. Now what does this tell us about Isaac? He's spending time with God. If he's meditating in the evening, he's spending time with God.
He's 40 years old, not married yet, but he's spending time with God. In the field toward evening, lifted up his eyes and behold, camels were coming. And Rebecca lifted up her eyes and when she saw Isaac, she dismantled from her camel. Isaac looked up and saw her and said, oh Lord, doesn't know who she is. She sees Isaac.
Said, I got to get off this beast. And she sees him and she said to the servant, who is this man walking in the field to meet us because she doesn't know that's the man she's come to marry. And the servant said, he is my master. Then she took her veil and covered herself, a statement of humility and honor. And the servant told Isaac all the things that God had done. And Isaac brought her into his mother's, Sarah's tent and took Rebecca and she became his wife and he loved her.
Ooh, watch it. How you going to love her? You don't know her. You just met her. Okay, let me ask you a question now. It is.
Watch this now. I get asked this all the time. Let me give it to you. Is there such a thing as love at first sight? Let me give you something better. Where is such a thing as love before first sight?
That's a new one. I'm just talking about love at first sight. I'm talking about love before first sight because God has gotten so involved in it that all the preparation is made so that when the first sight occurs, what God has prepared automatically jumps out.
She jumps off her camel. How many of you ladies just saw somebody walking down the street? I'm in love.
It's love before first sight. Ruth committed herself to the Lord in Naomi and God gave her supernaturally Boaz. Let me tell you another true story and then we'll wind this down to a conclusion. Look, we call him a bum, hitchhiking in Arkansas.
There were some men who drove by the guy and said, well, we pick him up. He said, where you go? Well, he said, I'm just going as far as you're going. Where you going? We're going to Texas.
We're going to Promise Keepers in Dallas, the one I spoke at. So they picked the bum up and drove him to Texas because he was just trying to find a new place to live. On the way, he told him his story, how he had become a Christian early in life, how he walked away from his Lord, bummed the Lord, and when he walked away from the Lord, he lost his family, he lost his children, hadn't seen his family in 10 years. He rededicated his life to Christ, so the influence of the Promise Keeper guys, and went to the Promise Keeper event.
He was on fire and they asked him, well, what do you want to do now? He says, well, I have some relatives in Alabama, and I just want to know if there's a way I can go to Alabama. They said, well, there are probably some guys here going to Alabama, he said, because I've committed my life back to the Lord, I'm going to find these relatives and try to get my life back on track. He committed his life to the Lord, and they asked around, is anybody going to Alabama? And I said, well, the Promise Keepers do sometimes, and then the guy says, I'm going to Alabama.
Would you have room for somebody else? He said, yeah, I drove the Promise Keepers by myself. I will be glad to take the man back. So the man, true story, got in the car with this younger man, and they are driving to Alabama, one committing his life to the Lord, and one who's already committed to the Lord, and they're just driving along. As they drive along, the bum begins to tell his story.
The young man says, oh, that's interesting, I'm from Arkansas too. They begin to exchange information, and halfway between Dallas and Alabama, he has discovered his own son is driving him home. That is the supernatural, sovereign moving of God. Dr. Tony Evans, encouraging us to put our trust and our relationships in God's hands. And stay with us because he'll be back in a moment to share some final thoughts to wrap up this message.
Before he does, though, today's lesson is part of a two-volume series called Fasting, The Key to Spiritual Victory. And as I mentioned earlier, you can own this collection on CD or digital download when you make a contribution to help us keep Tony's teaching on this station. As an added bonus, we're also including our inspiring Cultivating a Year of Kindness Perpetual Flip Calendar, good to be used for any year. Be sure to take advantage of this unique resource package while you still can. Just visit tonyevans.org to get the details and to make your contribution and request. That's tonyevans.org. Or call our 24-hour resource request line at 1-800-800-3222 and let one of our team members help you.
The number again, 1-800-800-3222. This message is a divine tool God uses to fulfill some of our deepest needs. But Dr. Evans says there's more to it than that, and tomorrow he'll talk about how to strengthen your connection with God and with your spouse. Right now, though, he's back with these final comments for today. I know you're tired, I know it's hard, there's a social problem going on, but you don't need to just flit all over the place, just raise your spiritual antenna so you can pick up the God network and get in on what he's doing. Yeah, but you say, I'm in a hurry, I'm getting older, the clock is ticking. That's like the man who told the businessman that he was in a hurry, he was rushing. The man said, where are you going? He says, I'm rushing to catch my plane. The man looked at him and said, don't rush, plane's not going anywhere, I'm the pilot. As long as God's the pilot, the plane's not going anywhere, don't rush. If you're looking for a mate and you don't feel called to singlehood, nor is it your preference because of sin and society and secularism, fast and pray to your change come. Amen.
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