You gave your life to Jesus a few years ago, and you are confident in your faith now. What’s the next step? Getting married to a good Christian partner? No. Your lifetime goal has nothing to do with your social status.
Getting to know Jesus is the base. You need to know your new identity in Christ. You need to know what it is to be a Christian: it’s privilege and it’s responsibilities; your blessings and your limits. You need to learn about faith, judgment, and resurrection (Heb 6.1-2).
After that, you need to know what your mission is. Getting married is not your mission! Marriage can help you, or not, but it’s not the goal for your life. You have been saved for a reason. You have a past life that can help someone in particular to meet Jesus. You have talents that will bring glory to God when you enter your calling. This second step is so important.
A lot of Christians lose their fire, they run out of oil because they are not entering the next step of their Christian life. Like everyone, after few years of discovering your identity in Christ, you get to a point where you think “And now what?” A lot of people turns to secular goals. “Now that I have a good spiritual life, let’s work on my career, or on my social status, or my physical shape…” Good goals, they can be pursued with godly attitudes and biblical references, but they are all still earthly goals. It’s then that your faith turns into a religion, or it goes colder.
After knowing our identity in Christ, we should all try to find out what our mission is in Christ. Your mission is what keeps you on fire. It’s what will force you to seek God. It’s where you will learn to fight spiritually and depend on God. It’s what blesses the Church, what builds up God’s kingdom, what reaches out to the lost.
I love the apostle Philip. There’s not much said about him in the Bible, but enough to draw great conclusions and a great lesson. He was a man of logic, the math guy of the disciples. Jesus knew his strengths, and sometimes He liked to tease him with it. “Jesus therefore lifting up his eyes, and seeing that a great multitude was coming to him, said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?” He said this to test him, for He knew what He would do. Philip answered Him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that everyone of them may receive a little.” (John 6.5-7 WEB) Philip was the disciple that could count and able to reason well. Maybe he was the accountant of the group! After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Philip was sent to evangelize to the Greeks! A man of God, with the skills of logic and deduction, was sent to the philosophers and the most logic people of all ages : the Greeks!
God wants to use your skills to witness to a specific kind of people. Unsaved people that couldn’t be reached by anyone else, because no one else has the same background, no one else knows how to talk to them the way you can. Maybe evangelism is not your strong point (it’s something you can ask God to help you develop though), but your talents could help the saints. What you’ve been through can lead you to become a great counselor, or you could help your church in managing their finances, or you could be the best daycare volunteer and make a huge difference in kids spiritual life.
Marriage is not the goal of your life. Finding out what God wants you to do with your talents, gifts, and your past is truly what you should be looking for. And be open : your mission while you are still single may not be the same as when you are married. Joining your skills with your partner’s might lead you to a totally different mission. However, the ones you have now, as a single person, is just as significant, just as important, as the one you will (or would) have as a married person. Don’t wait to enter your calling : you have something important and specific to do for God’s Kingdom right now. And this “job” might actually save your spiritual life!