4 Blessings God Will Give You If You Just Keep Waiting for a Godly Spouse

God always has a purpose for your season of waiting. It can be hard to keep believing this truth when you are actually in the middle of a long season of waiting for a godly spouse and you really want to be married, but it is always worth the wait when God is telling you to wait.

So here are 4 blessings God will give you if you just keep waiting on him for a godly husband or wife.

1. If You Keep Waiting on the Lord for a Godly Spouse, You Will Avoid the Pain that Always Comes When You Take Matters Into Your Own Hands

There’s a difference between waiting around for God to bless you and faithfully waiting on God to bless you. Many people think they are waiting on God, but in reality they are just waiting around to be blessed. While they are waiting around to be blessed they are also doing things God is not calling them to do, which means they are not really faithfully waiting on God. They are just waiting for him to bless them regardless of their own actions and obedience to the Lord.

One of the most overlooked blessings of faithfully waiting on God in obedience is the avoidance of self-inflicted misery. The world looks at biblical rules like religious joy-kills meant to make life boring. But God’s rules are not meant to take away joy; rather, they are meant to keep us from unnecessary pain and to increase our joy in the Lord.

This is crystal clear when it comes to God’s rules for relationships. For example, God does not tell Christians to avoid becoming unequally yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14) because he just wants to take away all the fun. God tells Christians to only marry other Christians because he knows that if you get attached to someone who is not first attached to Jesus in their own heart, that relationship will turn toxic really quick. 

Waiting on God to give you the person he wants you to marry one day not only speeds up the process because it helps you avoid making wrong turns on the journey towards your future marriage, it also helps you avoid the pain of getting into bad relationships. The only thing worse than being unmarried when you want to be married is to be in a dysfunctional marriage. As Proverbs 30:21-23 explains:

Under three things the earth trembles; under four it cannot bear up: a slave when he becomes king, and a fool when he is filled with food; an unloved woman when she gets a husband, and a maidservant when she displaces her mistress.”

So take heart if you are faithfully waiting on the Lord as a Christian single person who wants to be married. While you may long to be married to a godly spouse, you can also be thankful you are not currently married to an ungodly spouse.

2. You Will Be Better Prepared for Your Future Marriage If You Embrace Your Season of Waiting with the Lord

Wisdom is often forged in the fires of waiting. Impulsive people are not wise people (Proverbs 19:2). Being rushed and frantic is not conducive to being patient and peaceful. God has a purpose for your waiting, but you can miss that purpose if you do not combine patience with your waiting.

Just as there is a difference between waiting around for a blessing and faithfully waiting on God for his blessings, there is also a difference between reluctantly waiting and patiently waiting. Patience is less about waiting or acting and more about your attitude in both your waiting and acting. Being patient means you want something you don’t yet possess but you are also content in Christ while you are waiting.

Many Christians have been taught that it is a sign of discontentment in Christ if they long to be married, but that is not biblical. Just because you want something you don’t have, like a godly spouse, does not mean you are unhappy and discontent with what you do have in Christ. God has not called us to ignore certain longings in our hearts. Rather, God has called us to always find our ultimate joy in him regardless of what we do have or don’t have while on earth. This was Paul’s point throughout Philippians 4. He said:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. . . . Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:4, 11-13)

Notice that Paul did not just say, “Rejoice always.” Rather, he specifically said, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” This means that God has not called you to rejoice in your unwanted circumstances. If you want to be married to a godly spouse one day, God is not calling you to rejoice that you are still single. But if you are unmarried and you want to be married, God has still called you to continue to “rejoice in the Lord” regardless of what you do or do not have on earth.

This was Paul’s point about finding the secret to lasting contentment. Paul was not saying he wants to be brought low rather than abound. He was not saying that he wants to be hungry rather than well fed. He was not saying he would rather be in need rather than well supplied for. His point was that whatever circumstance he finds himself in, Christ is his ultimate joy and satisfaction. Going back to Philippians 3:8 he said, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

So one of the blessings that comes to those Christian singles who choose to patiently wait on the Lord for a godly spouse is that in their waiting God will be showing them the most important secret any of us can learn – that Christ alone is the ultimate source of our joy. If you get married without first learning this truth, your marriage will let you down. Marriage is meant to be a blessing from God, but God himself will always be the ultimate blessing and source of joy.

3. If You Keep Waiting on the Lord for a Godly Spouse, You Will Feel Freer to Take Steps of Faith When God Truly Does Want You to Take a Step of Faith Because You Will Know You Are Also Truly Willing to Keep Waiting If that Is What God Wants

As we just discussed in point 2, God will always call you to be patient but he will not always call you to keep waiting. Sometimes God will tell you to stop waiting while remaining patient. In other words, there is a time for waiting and there is a time for moving. As Ecclesiastes 3 explains:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted . . . a time to keep, and a time to cast away . . . a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8).

If you are waiting for seeds to grow that you never planted in the first place, you are waiting in vain. If you are waiting for God to put the manna in your mouth that he already sent from heaven and that is now laying on the ground for you to pick up and eat, you will remain hungry. If you want Jesus to multiply your fish and your loaves but you still have not given him the little that you have to be multiplied, you are wasting everyone’s time. If you want to be where God is, you have to walk where God walks.

My point is, waiting is not the only directions God will give you in life. He will call you to wait for a spouse, but once it is time there will be steps of faith God will call you to take to actually receive the blessing of a godly marriage one day. Many Christians, however, struggle when their season of moving comes and their season of waiting passes because when they were in their season of waiting they were impulsively disobeying God and trying to move ahead of the Lord rather than sitting still. When you know you were not willing to just wait, you will struggle to trust that God is the one who is now actually telling you to move forward. You will struggle to know, “Is this just me telling myself what I want to hear? Or is God really saying it’s time to move forward?”

But when you truly waited on God when he told you to wait and you did not dabble in relationships when you know God was telling you to just sit still, it will be much easier for you to trust that you are hearing God accurately when he does tell you to start taking steps of faith towards a relationship.

“Is God really telling me to try online dating? Is God really telling me to date that person from church? Is God really telling me to invite that person to the concert with me?” If you know you faithfully obeyed God when he was telling you to wait, you will then feel much more confident that it is actually God telling you to act now rather than your own voice because you will know that if God was telling you to keep waiting you actually would wait.

4. If You Keep Faithfully Waiting for God to Bless You with a Godly Spouse, You Will Have the Peace of Knowing You Are Submitting to God’s Will for Your Life No Matter What Happens Next

I hope you have not misunderstood the point of this article. I don’t believe the Bible says that waiting on God is the way to get him to do what you want him to do. God has a plan for all of our lives. For some of us that means marriage and for some of us that means a life of singleness. If you are someone who wants to be married, usually that means God has a marriage planned for you because he will not call you to be married if you don’t want to be married. To clarify, just because you want to be married does not guarantee you will be married. But if God calls you to marriage, he will also give you the desire for marriage. So if you have the desire, usually that means you also have the calling.

But even if you don’t get married in the timeline you desire, or even if you never get married (though most of you will one day), one of the best blessings of waiting on God is that you will know you are submitting to God’s will for your life. Sometimes we are called to do things we don’t want to do. Jesus did not want to go to the cross, but he did anyways. Why? Because he knew that obeying God’s will is actually what leads to the most joy. As Hebrews 12:2 explains:

. . . looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

May we seek to be like Jesus, who looked ahead to the joy he would have in God if he remained faithful and obedient. If you want to be married, God probably has a future spouse picked out for you. But either way, in the waiting, remain faithful. You won’t regret it.