First and foremost, we must remember that when Christ had bought us with His immense sacrifice, we are to no longer act as the world acts. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Rom 12:2). Now as Christians, most of us know that sex is reserved for marriage. But the issues run deeper than that. It’s not as if a Christian man and woman who date can date as the world dates, but just without intercourse. How we look upon each other must also be different from how the world views relationships.

In our modern  society, we use dating as the process that leads to marriage. In other societies, including those in the Bible, marriages were pre-arranged between the families of the bride and groom. Some of today’s Christians don’t even believe in dating at all but only in courtship, where a marriage leading relationship should only occur when the parents (if they are believers) of the potential husband and wife have blessed the relationship and romance is only to occur after a commitment to marriage has been made (i.e., after a formal courtship has been arranged). While a case can be made for courtship, it isn’t the only proper path to marriage, but there are some elements of the courtship process that are very valid and biblical.

The most important principle that single people need to keep in mind is that they should treat each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. The person you date may not end up being the one who you will eventually spend the rest of your life with but since they are a believer (and we assume they are a believer because that is really an obvious step 0 in dating), they are fellow heirs to the throne of grace. So what are the consequences of this? The most important is that we must be careful in how we conduct ourselves with those of the opposite sex. In God’s marriage economy, deep emotional and physical intimacy is one of the benefits reserved for the relationship between a husband and wife. The reason this is so is that God views marriage as a lifetime commitment and the only break in this kind of emotional and physical intimacy is to occur only in death. But if we substitute some of this intimacy to the dating world, to people we may not marry, we may end up blinding ourselves to potential warning signs about the other person which can lead us to marry a person we should not biblically marry.

So how does this apply in the real world? 2 Corinthians 7:1-2 says “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and every woman have her own husband.” Does that mean that we as men and women can’t shake hands? Not really. The touch refers to intimacy reserved for a husband and wife. That’s the key. If we allow this intimacy to occur outside of marriage, we have broken this commandment and we have sinned.

What about kissing? Without getting into specifics about what type of physical contact is within the bounds of obedience, these issues are best discussed using godly principles. Men and woman have different physiologies, and a man kisses a woman because he is physically attracted to her. Let’s say it bluntly. He is desiring her. For an unmarried man, this type of desire is called lust. “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) One of the reasons lust is such an abominable sin is its ability to obscure rational thought. When we lust after someone, we downplay or even ignore warning signs such as, oh let’s say, she might not even be a believer or that his Christianity might be weak or incompatible with our strongly held beliefs. God is much wiser than us and He knows the blinding disastrous effects of lust. Like other sins and temptations, it fights against our good judgement. What this translates to in terms of what types of physical contact is appropriate is between God and the individual. But the principle is clear and it is a test to determine whether we really desire to follow the Lord or our own lusts.

The same can apply to emotional romantic intimacy. Two items to consider here. First, when we are dating someone and we declare that we romantically love the person and start speaking in those terms, but have not committed to marriage, we have emotionally attached ourselves to the other person without any commitment. In the Bible, fornication is often described by an emotional attachment. God refers to Israel as fornicators due to their emotional attachment to the gods of the world and to their pagan neighbors. They were blinded by their desires to be loved by this world and fell into fornication. God takes this seriously because He knows that emotional myopia can be quite strong even without physical intimacy. It clouds us from really knowing a person. To know a person takes time, a lot of time. Placing emotional bonding too early in a relationship causes us to think about how we feel at the moment, which is temporally deceptive.

Secondly, God reserves emotional intimacy for marriage because in God’s marriage design, the husband and wife have been equally yolked and are to be married for life. Therefore this emotional attachment doesn’t carry a foreboding potential for abandonment as it would with an uncommitted relationship. What about potential divorce? Isn’t that abandonment? Keep in mind that divorce is our own sin and not part of God’s marriage economy. “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Mark 10:9) So in the proper Biblical order, this kind of emotional transparency is safe between a man and a woman in marriage because God expects a commitment without abandonment.

So one might think, that leaves dating pretty dry and boring doesn’t it? First, when we look at life through our sin-filled perspective, a lot of what is “exciting” is sinful and a lot of what is “dry” turns out to be obedience to God. We should make sure our perspective and attitude are fully aligned with the Bible before considering anything else. Second, many of us have male friends and female friends who are not marriage candidates who we have a brotherly and sisterly intimate relationship with in Christ and who we look forward to knowing as fellow believers. If we treat the ones we date as brothers and sisters in Christ in this manner, we have an opportunity to really know our compatibility with the person as a true best friend without the potential blinding effect of our emotional and physical urges. If we as a society were more Biblical in our perspective on dating, the divorce rate could conceiveably be far lower than it is today. God knows us. He knows our desire for intimacy, and we will greatly benefit in our quest for it by doing it His way. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt 6:33)

We start our consideration of prayer with a definition. What is it? Prayer is one aspect of our communication with God. The Lord speaks to us in several ways, including revelation through the natural world (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1), revelation through the Bible (II Tim 3:16-17), revelation through the sovereign actions of the Lord’s will (Rom 8:28), revelation through chastisement (Heb 12), and during the time that the Bible was being forged, communication directly with His prophets through actual speech, miracles, and dreams. Likewise, we speak to the Lord in several ways. During the time of the Bible’s formation, just as the Lord spoke directly to His prophets, they in turn dialoged with Him. In our time, we communicate with God through worship, through singing (Col 3:16), and through actions such as partaking of the Lord’s supper (I Cor 11). But our most direct line of communication with God is prayer. It is our monologue with the Lord. It is a time for us to bear our soul before Him and to focus on the Lord. Him and us. Us and Him. That is prayer.

So what do we do in prayer? There are at least three things. First, we praise God and acknowledge His holiness and sovereignty through our prayers. The Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 exemplifies this. Jesus, as He taught us to pray, glorifies the Lord and declares “Thy will be done.” Secondly, prayer is our opportunity to dialog with the Lord and declare our condition and confess our sins. We read in Psalms many of David’s prayers in lamenting his sin and asking the Lord for mercy. Third, in prayer we petition our requests to the Lord. Luke 18 contains a parable of a woman who persisted in petitioning a judge as well as an account of a publican who cried to God for mercy. This is the type of prayer that many believers probably use most and this is the type of prayer that we need to understand better.

In light of our Biblical understanding of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence and omniscience, how do we view the meaning and effect of our prayers? On the surface, could we not say, because God already knows our requests and has already predetermined the answers to our prayers, are not our requests essentially redundant?

We as humans have a natural thought process that focuses on cause and effect. If one commits an action, one expects a reactionary result of similar weight. Likewise, in our prayers, we may have a tendency of expecting an outcome as a result of our requests to God. But God works in ways that are beyond the scope of our thinking. For this reason, our understanding of the interaction between our requests and the operations of the Lord may never be complete within this lifetime.

We do, however need to understand that we cannot affect our circumstances in any way through our prayers. Our prayers do not bring down some mystical power of God to ourselves. We also cannot bargain with God through prayer to accomplish something we desire. God is sovereign and has already willed the outcome of the entire universe before we have ever uttered a word. He already knows our needs (Luke 12:30) and He even knows what we ought to pray for even if we fail to realize it ourselves (Rom 8:26). To pray with an expectation that we deserve something or that we can affect God’s will is self-centered and antithetical to the way we ought to pray.

So what then does James 5:16 mean when it says “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much?” Again, we must think outside of our man-centered nature and think of the complex interactions between man and God. The Lord, as our heavenly Father, wants us to speak to Him and it is through prayer that we do so. Just as an earthly father wants his children to submit and make requests to him before doing something even if the father knows what the child needs, God likewise wants us to turn to Him first in our time of need. Prayer is a manifestation of our submission to the Lord. It is our acknowledgement that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” In some way, prayer is a measure by God to test “where do we ultimately turn to for help?” “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.” (Psalms 121:1-2)

If we think about life without prayer, what would be our relationship with God? Even though He knows all our needs and His ways will be accomplished, we would have a silent relationship with Him. We would have a deistic relationship with Him. But God’s will is to communicate with His people through the Bible, through the natural world, and through prayer. As with the other means of communication, prayer is used by God to keep our minds focused upon Him.

Additionally, God shows us that His way will be done through our prayers. This goes back to the mysterious interplay between God and man. Just as the Lord uses witnessing as a means by which those He has already predestined to be saved will be saved, He uses our prayers as the avenue by which His sovereign actions will be accomplished. That is different than saying that our witnessing or our prayer is the driver of these things. Our actions are simply a part of God’s ultimate intricate operations. When our prayers are answered, it increases our faith and confidence of the sovereignty of God.

Finally, our prayer is a useful tool to thank God. Because prayer is our direct means of communication with Him, it is also one of the ways we praise and worship the Lord. “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” (1Th 5:18) Again, it harkins back to an earlier point that our prayers are used by God to keep our focus upon Him, not only in times of need, but in times of rejoicing. It brings us again into submission, acknowledging that it is God who is ultimately responsible for all good things.

God is a complex being and while communication with Him is on the surface, simple, the inner workings of it are quite complex. Thus, we cannot capture every aspect of prayer in this short examination. What we do know is that the proper view of prayer is God first, man second, not man first, God second. We pray submissively, humbly, and fearfully before the Almighty. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” (Psa 46:1)

Let’s take a man who claims to love the Lord Jesus Christ yet really doesn’t know very much about the Bible. Let’s say he is wrong about Christ’s role in salvation, he is wrong about his role as a Christian, he is wrong about God’s sovereignty and omnipotence and he is wrong about a number of different Biblical matters. Yet he claims to be a Christian. He claims to love Christ and God. Is his love valid? Perhaps in his mind, he would say yes. But more importantly, how would God view his love?

Let’s put this in a human perspective. If someone claims to love you, and when pressed about the issue, turns out to know next to nothing about you, what would be your reaction? If they don’t know what you consider important, don’t know what you like and dislike, don’t even know the color of your eyes, would you not wonder if they really loved you? Wouldn’t someone who claims to love you want to get to intimately know you? Similarly, we can ask, if we love God, yet we are not willing to search out who He is, how much do we really love Him? Do we say we love Him for our own satisfaction, that is, we say we love Him so that He can love us?

This is the heart of the matter. It’s not that being theologically incorrect in of itself will necessarily send us to hell, it’s that if we are stubbornly theologically incorrect, we show that we put ourselves before God. If we refuse to acknowledge or understand certain aspects of God despite Biblical evidence, it may show that we really don’t love God as much as we claim. And this is the importance of doctrine. “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” (I John 2:4) “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments…” (I John 5:2) If we say we love God and we don’t know anything about Him, anything about His will and His Law, could it be that we are deceiving ourselves?

It’s clear in the Bible that there will be people who claim the name of the Lord whom God will cast out of heaven. (Matt 7:21-23). These people will likely be utterly shocked because while they thought that they were in the comfort of God’s hand, they instead discovered that they were under His wrath and will be destined to hell. We can cite numerous other examples in the Bible of people perceiving God’s character incorrectly and suffering enormous consequences, from Cain’s unacceptable offering, to Saul, in his desperation, supplanting the role of the High Priest in I Sam 13, to God rebuking the churches in Revelations for their false doctrine.

So in reality, theology and doctrine are not just academic issues. They relate to our true love of God. If we have a high view of God and the utmost respect for Him, we will take the time, take all the time to really try to know Him. If we have a low view of God, we will be satisfied by just saying we love the Lord and be content with our assumptions about Him based on our desired perceptions of Him. That isn’t to say that we will get all of our theology correct just because we intently study the Bible. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit must apply knowledge to us, but if we don’t study the Bible and don’t give much thought to who God really is, we can guarantee the Holy Spirit won’t apply knowledge to us. “But his delight [is] in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.” (Psalms 1:2)