Free I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris

a romantic relationship before I'm ready for marriage."
    We could restate this by saying, "Intimacy "costs" commitment. If I'm not in a position to pay in the cold, hard "cash" of commitment, I have no business "going shopping" for my future mate."
    Before two people are ready for the responsibility of commitment, they should content themselves with friendship and wait for romance and intimacy. Exercising this patience will not handicap them relationally. In friendship, they can practice the skills of relating, caring, and sharing their lives with other people. In friendship, they can observe other people's characters and begin to see what they'll one day want in their mates. While we can learn worthwhile lessons from dating relationships, we need to make sure these relationships don't bog us down. Wasting too much time trying each other out as boyfriend and girlfriend can actually distract two people from the more important task of preparing to be good spouses.
    God has a perfect plan for your life. More than likely, that plan includes marriage, and if so, somewhere in this world God has the perfect person for you. You may or may not know this person right now. If you spend all your time and energy trying to hunt this person down or (if you've already found this person) trying to contain him or her until you can marry, you might actually do that person a disservice. The guy or girl you will one day marry doesn't need a girlfriend or boyfriend (even though he or she may want one right now). What that person really needs is someone mature enough to spend the season before marriage preparing to be a godly wife or husband.
    joshua harris
    Let's do our future spouses a favor and stop shopping around prematurely.
    3. Any season of singleness is a gift from
    48 God. Most of us won't remain single for our entire lives, and I think that we should view our singleness as a season of our lives, a gift from God. God gives an outline for the proper attitude toward singleness in 1 Corinthians 7:32. The Message translation reads:
    I want you to live as free of complications as possible. When you're unmarried, you're free to concentrate on simply pleasing the Master. Marriage involves you in all the nuts and bolts of domestic life and in wanting to please your spouse, leading to so many more demands on your attention. The time and energy that married people spend on caring for and nurturing each other, the unmarried can spend in becoming whole and holy instruments of God.
    Paul doesn't say this to put marriage down. He says it to encourage us to view singleness as a gift. God doesn't use our singleness to punish us. He has created this season as an unparalleled opportunity for growth and service that we shouldn't take for granted or allow to slip by.
    One person rightly stated, "Don't do something about your singlehood--do something with it!" Stop for just a minute and evaluate whether you're using God's gift of singleness as He desires. Ask yourself these questions: "Am I concentrating on "simply pleasing the Master"? Am I using this season of my life to become a "whole and holy" instrument for God? Or am I scrambling to find a romantic relationship with someone by
    the right thing at the wrong time... 79 dating? Could I possibly be throwing away the gift of singleness? Am I cluttering my life with needless complications and worries of dating?"
    While we're single, dating not only keeps us from preparing for marriage, it can quite possibly rob us of the gift of singleness. Dating can tie us down in a series of pseudo relationships, but God wants us to maximize our freedom and flexibility to serve Him. Any season of singleness, whether you're sixteen or twenty-six, is a gift. You just might do God a disservice by wasting its potential on a lifestyle of short-term dating.
    Do You really trust him?
    Though simply stated, these three truths bring about radical lifestyle changes when we apply them to our lives. To do so requires us to wait.