What if some of the hardest things you’re experiencing in singleness are actually preparing you for the marriage you’ve been praying for?
Here are four trials God may use in singleness to prepare you for marriage.
1. God Uses the Trial of Discontentment to Prepare You for Marriage
If you’re single and constantly thinking, “I’ll finally be happy when I get married,” you may actually be setting yourself up to be even more unhappy in marriage than you currently are in singleness. Why? Because when you get the thing you thought was going to make you happy, but it doesn’t, you then slip into an even deeper sadness (Proverbs 13:12).
Marriage can give you companionship, intimacy, friendship, and many wonderful things. But marriage cannot give you permanent contentment. Why? Because your spouse is a human being:
- They will love you, but they will also disappoint you.
- They will understand you sometimes, but sometimes they won’t.
- They will meet some of your needs, but they won’t meet all of them.
So if you’ve made marriage the solution to your discontentment, you’re eventually going to discover that marriage didn’t fix the problem.
Paul said in Philippians 4:11-13, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content . . . I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” Notice Paul said he had learned to be content. Contentment wasn’t automatic. God taught him through different circumstances. And the lesson God taught him was that good or bad times on earth weren’t the solution. Christ is the solution to discontentment!
Therefore, if you’re single and you’re feeling discontent, take heart! God is teaching you a valuable lesson that might just be the very thing that saves your future marriage: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
2. God Uses the Trial of Forgiving Someone to Prepare You for Marriage
When single people dream about their future marriage, they rarely think about the pain their future spouse will cause them. But the truth is, those we love the most are also the ones with the most power to hurt us. And sadly, despite our best intentions, we do hurt each other in marriage. You might think you won’t or they won’t, but trust me, you both will!
Thus, the solution is never going to be perfection. Rather, we need a solution to deal with our imperfections. And in Christ, God has supplied that solution on the cross, wrapped in the package of forgiveness.
But knowing how to forgive theoretically is very different from knowing how to forgive actually. Like anything else, it takes practice. If you hope to forgive your spouse, you first need to learn how to forgive others. You might think it will be easier to forgive your spouse because you will love them more. But in truth, it will actually be harder because the love you have for them will cause you to feel even more pain when they hurt you. Forgiving the very person you trusted the most is graduate-level type of forgiveness. Don’t expect to know how unless you learned lesser forms of forgiveness before you get tested that severely.
Colossians 3:13 says, “As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
3. God Uses the Trial of Asking for Forgiveness to Prepare You for Marriage
But there’s another side to forgiveness. You don’t just need to learn how to forgive. We also need to learn how to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. Will you forgive me?”
And in truth, for some of us, this is harder than forgiving someone else. It can take more humility to ask for forgiveness than it does to offer it. Our pride wants to defend itself. We want to explain why we did what we did. We want the other person to understand how their actions triggered us into our sins. But when we come in with all this extra pride and explanation, we aren’t really seeking forgiveness.
Real repentance isn’t just saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s admitting what you did was wrong and being willing to change. Proverbs 28:13 says, “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
And just as we have to learn to offer forgiveness, we also have to learn how to receive forgiveness. Some people ask for forgiveness, but then they continue punishing themselves with shame. They keep saying, “I don’t deserve to be forgiven.” And they distance themselves from the person they wronged even though that person wants to be reconciled.
But if you’ve genuinely repented and someone has genuinely forgiven you, you have to learn how to receive that forgiveness. In marriage, you have to be vulnerable enough to let your spouse love you like God has loved you. You have to let them offer you grace.
If you’re learning this lesson now, that’s a great sign you will succeed in marriage.
4. God Uses the Trial of Loneliness to Prepare You for Marriage
How can your loneliness now help you in your future marriage? You aren’t supposed to feel lonely anymore once you get married, right?
True, you’re not “supposed” to feel lonely anymore. But at times, you will. Every relationship goes through peaks and valleys. Hopefully you have more peaks than valleys, but eventually, something hard always happens in a marriage. And in those moments of feeling distant from your spouse, you have to know how to deal with that loneliness. Because if you don’t, that’s when you’re vulnerable to being tempted in ways you never thought you would fall to.
Affairs don’t just happen. Divorces don’t just appear out of the blue. A husband and wife who have morphed into roommates don’t get that way after one argument. Rather, things like this happen because the spouses didn’t know how to deal with the pain they felt, and so they turned to sin for comfort, which just makes the whole situation even worse.
But when you learn how to use your loneliness as fuel to seek God, you are then in a much better place to thrive in marriage when things get hard. By seeking the Lord, he will draw you and your spouse back together as you reconnect through his grace and mercy.
Psalm 73:25-26 says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” Only God can meet your deepest need for him.
Your spouse can meet many of your human needs, but your spouse cannot meet your God-needs.
So if you’re learning how to thrive with Christ even when you’re lonely, you’re actually learning something that will help you thrive in marriage too.
Related Article: 4 Marks God Is Getting You Ready for Marriage
