It is important to consult God in all things. We are at His service, so we must follow Him. The Holy Spirit is by far the best counselor regarding any situation. But beware: we must not neglect the part we have to play in every decision.

A preacher joked in one of his sermons that the devil was probably crying in his corner, sad that Christians accuse him of their failures when he did nothing in their situations. “I missed my bus: satan made me miss it!” Really? Is it not rather a simple lack of planning? “I had sex with this man, the devil made me fall ”. No, it was not the devil who made you sin. He may have initiated a temptation, but it was you who did not resist (1 Corinthians 10:13) and you who did not flee from the temptation (2 Timothy 2:22). If you are a child of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you, the devil cannot force you to do anything. You cannot blame him for the sins you do.

Similarly, other Christians expect God to do everything for them. Need a new job? They will pray. This is great in itself, but you also have to send applications, seek training developing new skills and knowledge, take care of yourself to be presentable at your interview! Even Joseph, while in prison, took the time to clean himself and look nice to meet the Pharaoh (Genesis 41:14). He didn’t just pray and let God take him from prison to the royal throne. He prepared himself and even gave his resume to the cup-bearer to pass on to Pharaoh (Genesis 40:14).

Many Christians are still single because they are waiting for God to serve them a life partner on a silver platter. Not only is this attitude self-centered, it is not biblical. The only man to whom God gave a specific woman was Adam, and it is because he had no one else to explain to him what to do with a partner! All the other love stories in the Bible have required human action. Either the father gives his daughter in marriage to someone, or a beauty contest was organized (like Esther), or a woman served at the foot of a man who had rights of redemption (like Ruth), etc. God should not be limited, maybe He could bring two people together in a supernatural way, but if there is no such example in the Bible, it is more sensible to believe that our partner will not appear on a cloud in front of our door.

Considering how God worked in the Bible, sentences like, “God showed me that you were going to be my wife” become strange. God never acted like this in the Bible. He didn’t say who to marry specifically, but He told people what to look for and where to go. When a married man tells us that God was the one that told him to marry his wife, we think he should rather say that he had the peace of God about marrying her. When they first met, he was in the right place (he was certainly not in a night club!) and he saw a woman who served the Lord (because falling in love based on her appearance is lust). This satisfied the basic criteria, because he chose that woman based on her relationship with God, and God is asking us to look for these basic criteria.

So we should change our language a bit and stop saying “God told me” to everything (Exodus 20:7). Some singles are still unmarried because they are waiting for God to give them a specific name or to see that special person they should marry in a vision. All God is asking us to do is to follow His precepts, and by doing that we will meet all kinds of good people who will be a good match for us. When a person stands out, we may then feel the peace of God that follows our obedience to follow His precepts.

Think about it, what is more interesting for a person to hear? “God told me to marry you!” or “I saw that you have a heart for God and since God is my priority too, I would like to become your friend”. In the first statement, the desired person is not entitled to their opinion! If God said so… While in the second approach, we show our interest, we show that it is not only their body that attracted us, we display our interest in God as well while we respect them enough to let them answer us or not. It is also less strange for unbelievers, who sometimes see us as incomprehensible madmen because our language is inaccessible to them. Instead of saying to them: “God showed me to marry her”, we can say to them “I felt that it was the right person because we had the same passion for God”. They may not understand your passion for God, but they will understand that you have something in common with the person you want.

You have to stop hyper-spiritualizing everything and waiting for God to tell you what to do in every little detail of your life. Sometimes we will need a specific direction and the Holy Spirit will help us do that, but most of the time you just have to follow His written word, and you will walk in the right direction (Joshua 1:8 ).