Marriage is one of the most important choices we make in life. Preparation for marriage involves more than detailing a beautiful wedding. Relationships are often entered into with high expectations towards the other. But the real question is: Are you who the person you are looking for is looking for? In this workshop you will discover key ingredients that will prepare you for an enjoyable lifelong relationship.

It Is Time

<p>Marriage is one of the most important choices we make in life. Preparation for marriage involves more than detailing a beautiful wedding. Relationships are often entered into with high expectations towards the other. But the real question is: Are you who the person you are looking for is looking for? In this workshop you will discover key ingredients that will prepare you for an enjoyable lifelong relationship.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

IMPACT Scandinavia

Daniel Pel

Finding Your Life-long Friend

Let's have a word of prayer before we get started.

Father in heaven, we want to thank you, Lord, that we can come before you this morning.

We want to thank you for the opportunity to open your word together and to talk about godly relationships.

We pray that you will bless our study and our time, that we may come to see your plan in all of this, Lord.

How that we can establish godly relationships and especially that person, that special person that you have for us in our lives, That is to be our lifelong partner.

So please guide us now and speak through us with your Holy Spirit.

Alright, So I guess all of you were not here on Friday.

Okay, maybe just, well, the seminar that we had on Friday?

No, okay, so you're all new, that's good.

It's gonna be a little bit different because you always see what you can do better in the second so it's going to be better than the first.

Okay, so the title for this seminar is Finding Your Lifelong Friend.

And I just want to read the workshop description that maybe some of you have already read in the booklet, but I want to read it again so we get an idea of what we're going to do here.

It says, marriage is 1 of the most important choices we make in life.

Preparation for marriage involves more than detailing a beautiful wedding.

Relationships are often entered with expectations towards the other, but the real question is, are you who the person you are looking for is looking for?

In this workshop you will discover key ingredients that will prepare you for an enjoyable lifelong relationship.

And so, what we're going to do in the course of our time together here is talk about the preparation for relationships, the preparation for marriage.

And many people enter into marriage with expectations.

Expectations towards the other person that they have chosen to unite their lives with And what many times happens is what first was a beautiful romance turns into a very drudgery experience a difficult experience because all those expectations might not be met.

And this, on many occasions, leads to divorce, or, and then, you know, a second marriage, or maybe another divorce, and we're looking around us and we just see the world and even in our own church, this is happening a lot.

And so, what we want to do is look at what the Bible tells us about how we can prepare ourselves to enter into a relationship that will last.

We're going to look at some very fundamental principles of scripture.

We titled this seminar, you know, Finding Your Lifelong Friend.

It's a little bit of a hook to get you here because finding your lifelong friend, when you hear that title, it's almost focused on the other, like what does he or she have to have as attributes for me to unite my life with him or with her.

Maybe a better title would be, how do I prepare for my lifelong friend?

Because we're going to actually focus more on our own personal preparation than on the qualities of the other, even though that's also going to be part of the seminar.

But sometimes we just think about, yeah, we have our list, like checklist, of the person that we want to end up with, and if they pass the checklist, then that's the person to go for.

But that's not what we're going to do here, even though, of course, there are qualities you're looking for in the other, but more importantly, and this was the question, I hope you kind of got that question, you have to think about it a little bit deeper, are you the person you are looking for is looking for?

In other words, are you the 1 that you would be looking for, right?

Not just putting the expectation on the other, But are you actually the 1?

Have you made those choices to prepare your life for that relationship?

If you really bring down the core of life, it's just a lot of choices.

You've made a lot of choices in your life as to, you know, where you live.

Certain choices, you know, you have not made but your parents have made, but ultimately there's a lot of choices that you make, especially as a young person, like where are you going to live, you know, what are you going to study, what kind of job are you going to have, who you are going to marry.

Some choices have big results, consequences, others, smaller consequences.

You know, you already made a lot of choices this morning when you got out of bed.

You decided what time to get up, you know, to stay a little bit longer or to actually get up to join the worship.

You already decided what you're going to wear this morning.

You decided whether to take the apple or the banana this morning.

Now these may have lesser significance, but the choice that has, there are choices, and there are really a few of them in life that have huge consequences, right?

The choice of your faith has huge consequences.

That you decided to be a Seventh-day Adventist and to follow the Bible, huge consequences.

Also the decision and the choice of relationships has immensely big consequences and results in every area of our lives.

And you look at happy couples and you look at couples that are kind of falling apart and sometimes we refer to them as, ah, you know that person, he or she is lucky, ended up with the right 1, and the other person that it doesn't go so well, well, it's just their lot in life.

And so we talk about luck and lot, but there's more to a relationship than having luck or being doomed to whatever your circumstances because it's really a choice and it is a preparation.

And that's what we really want to focus on here this morning.

How do we basically prepare ourselves to make the right choice of that person?

And I want to start after this foundation, I just want to start with dissolving a myth, okay?

And the right person myth is that you think that when you're going to meet that person, that dream, that is now still, you know, you're dreaming about or thinking about.

When you're going to meet her, you're going to meet him, the right person myth goes like, you know, once I meet him or her, all my problems are going to be solved.

You know, at the moment I'm lonely, but once I end up with, you know, My spouse, I'll no longer be lonely.

Now I have problems with anger, but you know, this is just because I'm alone and this is just because I don't have someone to fill in that part of my life, but just wait till I end up with that person.

You know, some people struggling with lust.

You know, my lust is gonna go away once I'm together with a person.

And all these problems that we have, we believe in this myth, many of us believe in this myth, the right person myth I like to call it, that once we end up with that person, everything is going to be alright.

The problem with that myth is that you have a lot of expectations towards the other person because you're like, okay, these are the problems I have, but once I meet the right person, that person's gonna solve all my problems.

And so, you know, you walk up the aisle, and you know, you stand before the pastor, and you say, you know, I do, and then you walk down the aisle with all these expectations and you dump them on the other person.

And so the other person now has to do this and this and this and this to make you a happy person.

Now, that doesn't work and so what happens is, you know, strife in the home and many times leading to divorce.

The other thing is that when you expect something, you're not going to be thankful when the person does it either.

Think about if you would book a night in a hotel, a five-star hotel, okay?

Best of the best, and you're paying like more than 100 euro for this 1 night.

If you come into the room and there's just a little bit of dirt on the floor, are you gonna just tolerate that?

No, probably you will go up to the person in the reception and say, hey, five-star hotel, I paid this, you need to clean that room.

This is how many enter into the marriage.

And if there's just 1 thing that doesn't really go according to their dream, there's the strife.

And so, instead of having the expectations towards the other, where we're going to start in this seminar, and you know, this is the beautiful thing.

Many of you are not yet married, you're single.

And so, you know, you're looking forward to that day that you will unite yourself with that person, if that is God's will and way for you.

And you can already decide now, you know, I want to become the person that my lifelong partner will be looking for.

Because when I walk up the aisle and I say, I do, I don't want it to be merely just, you know, words.

You know, I want that promise to mean something.

I want that promise to mean that actually, God, that you have prepared me and enabled me to follow you and to be everything that you want me to be, to fulfill that promise.

Now in order to give a little bit of a structure to this seminar, we're going to go over a couple of points on how to prepare for a relationship.

We chose a chapter in the Bible that many of you will be familiar with, and in this chapter there are just a lot of principles, foundational principles that are so crucial in not only the relationship between a young man and a young lady, but actually in all relationships.

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Finding Your Life-long Friend

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Sound Doctrine