How Babylon Dating & Christ-Based relationships are at odds
Highly Unpopular truth ahead:
There are two paradigms at war. The culture of immediate gratification and the Kingdom of God about meaningful service and selective and intentional relating. You should not date anyone until you are ready to court or be courted — meaning enter into a lifetime of service and ministry to someone. Dating culture is not Biblical.
Highly unpopular facts: Dating is not for your entertainment. It is not about you, your feelings, your perceived wants or needs; it is only about who shares a compatible purpose and mission in Kingdom Assignments. Few know their purpose or their kingdom assignments and thus don’t come close to the fundamental requirement to date. Your personal fulfilment is NOT the goal; rather it is the BYPRODUCT of being in a partnership centered around ministry / purpose from the gifts and callings God has given you.
When the Christian community fails to teach people how to know their calling and purpose, young people are left without a VISION for their lives. They are thus setup to fail, to wander, to drift. And yes there is soul seeking in your purpose and Kingdom assignments. And yes these can change in different seasons of life. But the problem with selfish, entertainment culture and its approach to relationships is:
• setup to get ABNORMALLY close to another person at a superficial level abnormally fast
• thus setting yourself up for hopes, expectations, and emotions you have NO REAL RIGHT TO HAVE given this is not a commitment-based relationship
• creating soul ties with a person that turns out to be FICKLE, DISPOSABLE — in and out of your life in a matter of mere months or years
All of which DAMAGES your heart. The PUSH/PULL of it all, tears your heart, if you are honest! It sets you up for WOUNDEDNESS and HEARTBREAK — not for purpose, for true love, for vitality in the context of mutual ministry. This damage from a vapid, vain, selfish cycles of CONNECTION AND DISCONNECTION from other human souls is unnatural and horribly damaging. This is not what God intended for your heart.
I realize people until recently were not nearly as much city-based, with vast numbers bumping into each other at high speed. We used to be more community-based. And while a smaller number of people a life would normally interact with can have its own problems and limitations, it did prevent the following: getting attached to a person based on APPEARANCE, and not observing their life, their behavior, their values over the course of a few years BEFORE initiating a more personal connection.
We get drawn in by the LURE of APPEARANCE. Today with selfies this is to an extreme. We thus both ATTACH and DETACH/DISCARD another person WAY too fast — in fickle, selfish, opportunistic and ABUSIVE WAYS. The net result are kids with hearts as DAMAGED as someone having been through 5 divorces, emotionally speaking, by the time they are in 10th grade.
This sets our youth up for addictions, compensations from personal pain, feeling all the more misunderstood / alienated / unwanted, etc.. I say it again: whether you have had sex or not in highschool; whether you have dated steady in highschool or not, the UNNATURAL EMOTIONAL roller coaster of hopes, expectations, needs RUSHING to another person and eventually that “relationship” (if you can even call this superficial entanglement that) being established and then discarded is ABUSE of the human heart. This is the exact abuse that dating sets us all up for.
We’ve grown up with and been surrounded by this “dating culture”, fickle and selfish. And all of that massively amplified by the internet, cell phone apps, and social media — escalating year by year rapidly since about year 2008 thereabouts (when cell phone data speed became fast enough for all these apps and social platforms). A carousel of lures meets disappointment. The result is a society of extremely damaged hearts.
The fact is that you were fundamentally meant to BOND DEEPLY with someone on the same mission as you. A place where there is the best foundation for understanding each other, having compassion, having service. No, not perfect and full understanding — that will only happen in heaven. But not a place where you are drawn in and then kicked out based on whims, trends, and selfish emotional needy agendas.
Such a place is the grounds for massive abuse to the profound depths of the human heart. Chances are that God has lots of work to do on you. Lots of clarity and understanding and compassion to install in you. Till then you are, in fact, TOXIC to get too close to!
Your neediness is codependent and your selfishness is toxic. For God to really LOVE you, He must chip away at everything unloving within you. Despite emotional wants and the urge to immediate gratification, you are NOT READY to meaningfully love or serve another human. A world addicted to immediate gratification is in RABID DENIAL of this fact. When you rush in while you are still in rough form, you damage each other, regardless of your conscious good intentions.
When we trade purpose for entertainment, we adopt a worldly selfish viewpoint — thereby setting our lives up for shipwreck, heartbreak, and many other disasters. Only enter into communication with those God as instructed you to communicate with.
This is not to be hyper withdrawn; this is to be set apart for service. A high service to make the most positive difference. This is to be on purpose as opposed to a wasted life. All your relationships are those God has sent you to serve. If you’re APPROACHING RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE AGENDA TO BE SERVED, you are fundamentally disqualified from being ready to date.
God made your soul for relationships at the level of COVENANT. The world has no idea what covenant even means, let alone desires to engage in a deep commitment to seek from God that which the beloved needs most and provide that unselfishly. When you settle for less than a COVENANT grounded relationship, you volunteer to be abused, to be treated as less than you actually are.
Let’s say this a different way: you are supposed to only be emotionally vulnerable to another human that is HIGHLY ATTUNED to hearing from God how they can bless you, minister to you, speak truth to you. As it is we have a covenant-avoidant culture or rampant selfishness. People are like LOOTERS to each other; not ministers to each other. Partnership can only thrive when you are a mission that is God-given. Looting is a crime.
This is indeed hard, this Babylonian nightmare of fake relationships and heart abuse. If you run out into the streets experiencing a riot, you have a high chance of being hit in the head! Damaged by a random stranger! Don’t do that. Likewise don’t just throw your heart out into the DANGER ZONE of connecting to those who have NO CAPACITY for ministry-based relationships.
You were meant for someone who connects to God deeply, SO THAT they can understand your core needs, and then that person GOES TO GOD with a heart of love and ministry towards you, to be instructed BY GOD on how to love you. Connection, communication with God, flowing with the Holy Spirit in the love of Christ is FOUNDATIONAL — it is essential to loving, not abusing, each other.
A rush to feeling entertained and excited runs completely counter to your heart’s needs, so don’t get tricked into that trap. People are seeking someone outside themselves to just magically make themselves happy. They don’t even know how to hear from God for themselves, let alone discern what love needs to look like for another person.
You are far too valuable and special to just connect with ANYONE. You need someone who reciprocates God’s love. Anything less is volunteering to be abused — like tossing your heart into a burning building. We see hearts at young ages that have been ravaged by the burning building of Babylonian culture. God’s church is the exact opposite as it is those who have intentionally DISCONNECTED from the death and abuse culture of Babylon to the LIFE-CULTURE of unselfishness.
