Holiness or Happiness?

A lot of talk has been swirling around about a recent weekend sermon..

To cut a long story short, we are admonished to be less picky about out life partners.

Side one argument - but the men are not initiating

Side two argument - the women are too picky

Actually I think the actual argument is.. do I be content in my singleness and wait for THE ONE or do I feel restless and go and look for someone.

This applies to both men and women actually.. but of course the bulk of the burden is on the men cos if the men initiated, then there would be less necessity for the women to put themselves in a postition to "look" but either way, I think at a point of time, we all get " lazy" - the sin of sloth..
The question then is what do we do with our time and energies while we wait .. do we use our time to serve the Lord or do we use the time to look or do we use the time to enjoy ourselves..

I guess the wise answer is all 3 .. the question is how much of each..

Most of us would undoubtably agree that we would rather enjoy ourselves and live life as a single to the fullness - travel, watch movies, watch shows.. for we have spending power and less committments.

Many of us also serve the Lord ferverently.. and it is good but sometimes we use it as an "excuse" for not going out to look for people. (Any of you'll have tried this on God.. If I serve you, I trust you to be my matchmaker) The concept itself is not absolutely wrong however for everything God does, there is also a human responsibility

Then there is the small minority who say I am going to solve this problem and they go and join the circuit of matchmaking/online dating and really do life happily (?) after all..

Perhaps we should spend less time arguing about the benefits of singleness or the benefits of marriage.. for which there is a plethora of different godly pastors waiting to defend either.
Piper is more for singleness, Mark Driscoll and Al Moehler are more for marriage.. I think Tim Keller's take is slightly different.. he's more for the friendship in marriage.

For ultimately God can work in all the different ways.. and He does.. looking at the way He has orchestrated marriages, children. There is no formula, only the one He chooses for you. So our job is to get on our knees and pray for Him to be real in our lives, in marriage and singleness and to give us the strength to go out and do whatever He wants us to do when in His good time he plans.

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