Mankind

Selections from Not Yet Married by Marshall Segal, Crossway Books, Wheaton.

p.23, We are all wired to want happiness, love, and significance.

p.26, God loved us even though we never deserved his love (Rom 5:8).  You and I were dead without Christ – not wrong, not sick, not stupid, but dead!  

p.27, But God made you and me for far more than marriage, business, or whatever else we each might choose for ourselves.

p.28, A lot of us want to keep God close enough to save us but far enough away to let us do what we want to do.  

The Bible doesn’t begin with Adam.  It begins with God!

God is the author, the painter, the creator in this story – in every person’s story.  So why did God create you?… He repeats himself three times to make himself clear (image –Gen. 1:26-27).  He made you in his image, in his likeness – to look like him…That question (Why did God create you?) is infinitely more important than asking whom we will marry (or even if we will marry)…We’re meant to be living, breathing pictures of him and his glory – his beauty, his integrity, his mercy, his justice, his love (Is. 43:7). 

pp.28-29, The most important thing we could accomplish here on earth, then, is to give ourselves completely to telling the world with our whole life that God is truer, greater and more satisfying than our wildest imagination – than the most successful career, the biggest platform, or the happiest marriage.

p.29, What is God’s will for your life (and for your future marriage)?  “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (I Cor. 10:31)…Drink and eat, work and play, date and marry in ways that strive to win the world for Jesus.  Invite them into the overwhelming, life-changing love you’ve found. 

p.30, In Jesus Christ, God came in all his glory to save those who had trashed his glory and to remake them into living, breathing, and believing images of his worth and beauty, again.  You were made for glory, and you were saved for glory.

p.31, I realize that the gospel was a story for me but that it was not a story about me. This good news – the news that rescued me from hell and promised me heaven – was not about God making me happy apart from him and his glory but about satisfying me now and forever with himself.  

God saved you for God…Saved to make God look glorious.  Blessed to make God look satisfying.  Kept to make God look worthy.  And because He loves you!