Does God pick your spouse for you? I didn’t realize that God won’t control who I marry as I searched for the woman God had for me. In all my teenage thoughts of romance and marriage, nothing seemed better. Spending a lifetime pursuing God with the woman He wanted me to be with for life? Nothing seemed better. I firmly believed that the best romance and marriage is the one that God builds, not me.
Does God Pick Your Spouse?
You’ve probably heard Christians talk about how you should “wait for the spouse God has for you” or “seek God’s will” in your love life. The idea of letting God choose who you marry and guide you to that person is popular among Christians.
This is often because (1) Christians want to obey God’s will in their lives or (2) believe that God knows the best possible match for them.
However, 1 Corinthians 7 paints a different picture. Instead of teaching us to expect God to control our love lives, the chapter reveals that God gives us freedom to choose if we marry and, thus, whom we marry. It might seem odd to us that God would want us to make such big decisions rather than yield them to Him. Understanding why God gives us the choice becomes easier when we look through the lens of the following three reasons:
#1 – Does God Pick Your Spouse? God Won’t Control Our Choice Because Love Must Be Free.
When I say “free,” I don’t mean “without cost.” I mean “not enslaved.” Love, by its nature, must be free or it’s not love. Maybe you’ve heard the saying that you shouldn’t take a robot to the prom because she doesn’t really love you. It means that anyone who’s forced to love you doesn’t really love you. You can’t really know if a person loves you unless he or she has the option not to.
If it were God’s will for us to marry a particular person, refusing would be disobedience. We would have to marry that person in order to obey God. We would be accepting the person because we were required to, because we had no other option. That would eliminate the opportunity to love freely and genuinely. But God wants us to love freely and genuinely. That’s why God gives us freedom to choose if we marry and whom we marry. That freedom gives us space in which to love.
#2 – Does God Pick Your Spouse? God Won’t Control Our Choice Because Love Is Better Than Matching.
Finding the right match is a popular idea in modern America. Many people think a successful marriage is made by finding the right match and that a failing marriage means the match was bad. But this is a backward way of thinking. Even the best of matches will experience conflict eventually, and even the best of matches can be ruined if conflict isn’t handled well.
Even we Christians fall into the trap of thinking too much of matching. Even worse, we bring God into it. Some Christians want God to pick their spouse because they think He, with His infinite knowledge, knows who the absolute best match is. It’s as though we want God to be our supernatural matching algorithm.
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