GYC SE 2008: ReGeneration

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GYC Southeast

Alan and Nicole Parker: Letting God Write Your Love Story

Nicole Parker

Letting God Be the Author of Your Love Story

Father in Heaven, we just want your spirit to fill every 1 of our hearts.

We want you to be the center of our lives and we want our relationships to reflect our love for you.

Lord, every 1 of us is here because we do have a heart hunger for love And you've put it into our hearts.

And I pray, Lord, that you will help us to see how we can find satisfaction in that by your strength and by your grace.

And I pray that you will work out your will in every life and in every heart that's represented here.

All right, well, for those of you who don't know, my husband is from Africa and I grew up in America.

So we had never met each other until a year, actually a year and 2 days before we got married.

He was pastoring over in Africa and I was living in New York.

And at the time, I had been through a few, a couple of relationships.

I really had stopped dating when I was 16.

And I didn't start dating again until I was about 23.

And things just didn't work out each time.

The first time, I think just because I got into the relationship because, well, he's a nice guy and I'm a nice girl and we both are consecrated to God.

And that I wouldn't recommend as a good way to find somebody to marry.

There were a lot of reasons that things didn't work out well.

And then I dated another guy, and it really seemed like God had worked miracles to bring us together.

And it was a long distance relationship, but everything was working so great until we actually spent time in the same place at the same time.

And then we found out that we just really weren't going to work out.

So I think that the Lord gave me those experiences.

While it isn't his will for us to go through a lot of heartache and trouble, I think he allows us to go through things sometimes that will be a blessing to other people and a blessing to us.

If I hadn't had that long distance relationship that didn't work out well, I might not have known the dangers of a long distance relationship.

And I might go around recommending to everybody, yeah, find somebody.

Online relationships are great, blah, blah, blah, because most of our getting to know each other was long distance.

But the principles I'm going to share with you today apply whether you're relating to each other long distance or you've known each other ever since you were kids and grew up next to each other.

I know God has a plan for your love life.

He has a plan for how he wants to fulfill the desires in your heart.

You know, we're told in the Bible that it is not good for man to be alone.

Sometimes I've had people come to me and They're like, I just feel so guilty, I know I shouldn't date somebody but I like this girl.

And I'm like, there's nothing wrong with liking somebody.

There's nothing wrong with having that longing and that attraction.

The problem is we have to keep it under control until the Lord tells us it's the safe time to unfetter it, the safe time to pursue a relationship.

Now when I say the Lord tells us, I don't mean that you're going to hear a voice from Heaven or a miracle or something like that.

But I think you'll see as we're talking through this seminar that God has many ways to speak to us And he will speak to us most of all in his word and help us to learn what his plan is for our love stories.

Every love story is unique, just like every person is unique.

And it's so beautiful to see what God does when we surrender to him.

Now we're living in an era when there's more love in the air than any previous time in history.

For 1 thing, a lot of people get married multiple times.

So if 50% of marriages end in divorce, That doesn't mean that 50% of you are going to get divorced.

But there are a lot of weddings going on.

And people just dream of their wedding day.

And a lot of that is because of the culture we live in with movies and music and everything else, glorifying that if you just find the 1 person out there who will love you and make you satisfied for all of your life, then you'll be happy.

And I'm here to tell you that's not the truth.

But we're living in a time when you can click on Google and put in love and find a million resources.

Literally, you can find so much about love, about how to fall in love.

You can find somebody to date guaranteed.

As long as you've got internet access, you can find somebody to love.

And there are more weddings and more people falling in love than ever before.

And yet it's the loneliest time in history.

More people are devastated by loneliness.

More people are suicidal, especially in our culture today, than we've seen in history.

It's just an epidemic of depression and of loneliness.

And that is largely because marriage is seen as the solution to our loneliness problem.

It's like, if I just find somebody who will love me.

We need to find somebody who will love us in order to fulfill us.

Human love is not strong enough or pure enough or deep enough to satisfy the craving of the hungry heart.

But God has created in us that longing for love, and he wants us to find the satisfaction in him first.

And when we find that satisfaction in Christ, when he purges our thirst, You have that thirst.

If you're not dating somebody, it's a lonely experience to be at Southern and walk past all the other people who are dating somebody.

Even if you were fine until you came here, all of a sudden you see everybody else is in love, and it hits you, right?

You know, this is a reality in our culture.

We have a culture that makes us feel like until you find somebody to love, you're never going to be happy.

And once you find somebody to love, then you'll be happy.

But the love that God wants us to drink deeply from is from above.

As the Bible says, my people have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have hewed out for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.

As you see with your friends, people who are dating, most of the time, break up.

And then they have their whole lives shattered.

Probably almost everybody who comes to Southern goes through some relationship that falls apart and it wrecks a semester.

It may even wreck their entire time here.

And I know a lot of people leave here with their hearts broken.

They feel like they have no future because they found love, but then it fell apart and it didn't bring them the happiness they dreamed of.

But God has created in us this longing for love.

He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

So that longing to be loved is a God-given craving.

And God wants us to find the satisfaction of it and the fulfillment in him first and in him alone.

Alan Parker

Making and Keeping Your Relationship Healthy

Father God, we want to thank you that you have brought us to this place, that we are gathered to find out how do we have a healthy relationship.

Some of us, Lord, have made a bunch of messed up mistakes in our past.

We want a new birth into the kind of experience that you have for us.

How are you going to know if you're healthy?

You want to find out how healthy you are?

He's going to have a bunch of questions for you.

He's going to look at your health habits.

He's going to look at your mental attitudes and stress factors.

So we want to do the same thing now with our spiritual health.

We want to take a look at some vital signs.

And I'm going to begin with some vital signs that we often don't look at.

You can trust yourself, and we'll deal with that in a moment.

So you need to listen to what other people are saying.

Sometimes other people have no idea about your relationship.

Do you hate it when people give you advice that you don't want?

And so they come, they tell you everything about your love life.

And you're like, look, if you're that interested in my love life, it's a sign that you need something.

Your parents, your friends, your mentors, people who care about you, what are they saying about your relationship?

And if they are raising warning signs and they're saying, you know what, something's just not right in that relationship.

And then you need to look at how does this measure against the Bible.

The problem is when we get into relationships, we have gut reactions.

When I see her, the ships float on the ocean.

When I see her, it's like a flock of goats.

There are some things that we go by gut reaction.

But when it comes to relationships, our gut reaction is often wrong.

How many people have said that when they're actually quite sick?

And so you can't trust your gut reaction.

What you need is a God reaction, not a gut reaction.

So we want to take a look at the spiritual pulse of your relationship.

How well is your relationship growing and building?

Some great questions from the book, Adventist Home, page 45.

Is this relationship leading me toward heaven?

And you're saying, is this relationship 1 that leads me toward heaven or not?

Does it increase my love for God or my love for sex?

Does it increase my usefulness Or am I incapacitated by this relationship?

Then a vital sign is not working your relationship.

Some people say, oh, you know, since we started dating, we get together every day and we pray.

And they don't realize that what happens is your emotional side is very close to your spiritual side.

And I've seen guys, I mean, they haven't even been in church for 2 years.

But once they meet a girl, it's like suddenly they want to go to every prayer meeting.

They haven't opened their Bibles and had a serious Bible study since they were 2 years old.

And I remember how I decided I wanted to get close to a girl.

And I thought, how do I get close to a girl?

Single and Satisfied

Father in Heaven, we just ask for your spirit to be here with us.

Open our minds to your word, Lord, and to your will for each 1 of our lives.

I know you have a beautiful love story you want to write for each 1 of the people who are here.

First, love with you, and second, If it's your will, love with someone else.

There was a time in my life when I was very single and very not satisfied.

I started dating when I was about 14 and in the procession of guys that I dated between then and 16, I figured out this was just not a good idea.

So when I committed my life to the Lord, I also committed my dating relationships to the Lord and that meant for me no longer dating.

I didn't date from when I was 16 until I was 23.

Initially I was like, how am I going to live this way?

You know, I shared in an earlier seminar how I was such, I was known as being a huge flirt.

And I just thought, how am I going to live this way?

It's just like, you know, I decided I was going to do the God thing and for me the God thing meant going off to the convent And just deciding I wasn't going to have any relationships with guys and I was going to try to do everything 100% the way that God wanted me to.

But I have to admit, I thought, you know, God certainly does have some harsh requirements here.

But I realized that I needed to get my thought life straight.

I spent a lot of time dreaming about guys.

And when I'd come home and lie down at night, I really longed for somebody to be there with me so I would create imaginary stories.

My best friend Dana and I, we were going to be novelists together and write novels under the pen name Danica.

And we wrote lots of wild love stories that were very romantic.

And we were captured by Indians and all kinds of things.

But you know, the bottom line was our lives were not even, it was not possible for us to be captured by Indians.

And it was no more possible that we actually find true love with the mindsets that we had.

And so when we parted ways, when I chose to take 1 direction in my life and sign off from dating, she chose a different path And it wasn't a very happy 1.

And what I thought was such a terrible sacrifice that the Lord was calling me to, I can tell you, was 1 of the greatest blessings of my life.

Not only did I make so many rich quality friendships, both opposite sex and same sex, because I found that once I couldn't feed that hormonal high of flirting with guys and feeling so good because I'd have these deep, intimate talks with guys who I wasn't dating.

We're just like brother and sister, blah, blah, blah.

But once I didn't have that and I wasn't feeding that anymore, I found that being friends with girls was a lot more attractive than it had been before, when I could compare sitting down with a girl and spilling my guts versus sitting down with a guy and spilling my guts.

But I built close friendships with girls.

I've found that being single could truly be satisfying.

And that's what I want to share with you today, the keys to how I found that and how I believe that God wants to have that for every 1 of you.

If you're not married, God wants you to be single and satisfied.

Now I shared a little bit about this study earlier.

According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, most people were no more satisfied with life after marriage than they were prior to marriage.

How many of you were here when I shared this earlier?

This study took 24, 000 individuals and looked at how they reacted to getting married.

And they found that they generally stayed at pretty much their personal set point of happiness.

And they'd have a little blip of extra happy around when they got married, maybe the year before when they're engaged, and maybe some of the year afterward.

And then they go right back to being just as happy as they were before.

The miserable people were miserable again.

And some people are happier than others, the researcher Diner concluded.

And there are things you can do to make yourself happier.

But something external, like getting married, isn't a royal road to changing your set point.

Oh no, my husband is putting slides in beforehand.

So yes, That means that, excusing that slide that sneaked in, this is a seminar on how to have a happy marriage.

By sitting down and learning how to be a happy single, you're learning how to be a happy married person.

Because the same principles are going to apply.

Marriage is different, but it's not necessarily better.

I like marriage better than being single, but I think it's mainly because the path of the just is as a shining light, the Bible says.

It shines more and more unto the perfect day.

Marriage is better because it's wonderful, it's secure.

I feel so safe in knowing my husband loves me forever.

But I realize for most people who get married, they don't have the same security that I do because we didn't cheat on each other.

We didn't have sex with anybody else before we married each other.

Because I know when my husband goes to work, I don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that he is being faithful to me, whether he's in my sight or not.

But it's also happier because as I'm spending more and more time, every year I become more of who God wants me to be, by God's grace.

And marriage is a wonderful way to grow, to learn so many things about myself that I didn't realize.

You don't really realize how stuck you are in your own ways until you try to load a dishwasher with somebody else.

Don't try to reason with a rational person like my husband.

Marriage is great, but it's not as romantic as dating.

So some people, they get married expecting, wow, now we're going to live an intense, you know, The wonders of engagement are just going to be multiplied.

Boy, everything is just going to be so intensely exciting all of our lives.

I remember when I was like, I don't know, 10 years old or so, and I was just thinking, man, if someday I could only be big enough to drive, big enough to go sleep over at my friend's house, Big enough to whatever it was.

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Series

Alan and Nicole Parker: Letting God Write Your Love Story

Single and Satisfied

Transcript

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