Sermon Tone Analysis

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY DEFECTIVE DATING

By Joshua Harris

 

Recognizing dating’s negative tendencies

 

When I was a kid, my mom taught me two rules of gro­cery shopping.

First, never shop when you’re hungry—everything will look good and you’ll spend too much money.

And second, make sure to pick a good cart.

I’ve got the first rule down, but I haven’t had much success with that second rule.

I seem to have a knack for picking rusty grocery carts that make clattering noises or ones with squeaky wheels that grate on your nerves like fingernails on a chalk­board.

But by far the worst kind of cart you could pick is the “swerver.”

Have you ever dealt with one of these?

This kind of cart has a mind of its own.

You want to go in a straight line, but the cart wants to swerve to the left and take out the cat food display (And, much to our dismay and embarrassment, it too often succeeds!)

The shopper who has chosen a swerving cart can have no peace.

Every maneuver, from turning down the cereal aisle to gliding alongside the meat section, becomes a battle—the shopper’s will pitted against the can’s.

Why am I talking to you about shopping carts?

Well, I recall my bad luck with grocery carts because many times I’ve experienced a similar “battle of wills” with dating.

I’m not talking about conflicts between me and the girls I’ve dated.

I mean that I’ve struggled with the whole process.

Arid based on my experiences and my explo­ration of God’s Word, I’ve concluded that for Christians dating is a swerver—a set of values and attitudes that wants to go in a direction different from the one God has mapped out for us.

Let me tell you why

 

SELF.CONTROL ISN’T ENOUGH

 

I once heard a youth minister speak on the topic of love and sex.

He told a heart-rending story about Eric and Jenny, two strong Christians who had actively participated in his youth group years earlier.

Eric and Jenny’s dating relationship had started out innocently—Friday nights at the movies and rounds of putt-putt golf.

But as time went by, their physical relation­ship slowly began to accelerate, and they wound up sleeping together.

Soon afterward they broke up, discouraged and hurt.

The pastor telling the story saw both of them years later at a high school reunion.

Jenny was now married and had a child.

Eric was still single.

But both came to him separately and expressed emotional trauma and guilt over past memories.

“When I see him, I remember it all so vividly,” Jenny cried.

Eric expressed similar feelings.

“‘When I see her, the hurt comes back,” he told his former youth pastor.

“The wounds still haven’t healed.”

When the youth minister had finished telling this story you could have heard a pin drop.

We all sat waiting for some sort of solution.

We knew the reality of the story he told.

Some of us had made the same mistake or watched it happen in the lives of our friends.

We wanted something better.

We wanted the pastor to tell us what we were supposed to do instead.

But he gave no alternative that afternoon.

Evidently the pas­tor thought the couple’s only mistake was giving in to tempta­tion.

He seemed to think that Eric and Jenny should have had more respect for each other and more self-control.

Although this pastor encouraged a different outcome—saving sex for marriage—he didn’t offer a different practice.

Is this the answer?

Head out on the same course as those who have fallen and hope that in the critical moment you’ll be able to stay in control?

Giving young people this kind of advice is like giving a person a cart that swerves and sending him into a store stocked with the world’s most expensive Chinaware.

Despite the narrow aisles and glass shelves laden with delicate dishes, this person is expected to navigate the rows with a cart known to go off course?

I don’t think so.

Yet this is exactly what we try in many of our relationships.

We see the failed attempts around us, but we refuse to replace this “cart” called dating.

We want to stay on the straight and narrow path and serve God, yet we continue a practice that often pull us in the wrong direction.

Other Topic~/Subtopic~/Index: 

Marriage~/1620-1621

 

 

Topic:  Love

Subtopic:  Marital

Index:  1623

 

Date:  7~/2001.101

Title:  HIGHLY DEFECTIVE DATING

 

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY DEFECTIVE DATING  2 of 5

By Joshua Harris

 

DEFECTIVE DATING

 

Dating has built-in problems, and if we continue to date according to the system as it is today, we’ll more than likely swerve into trouble.

Eric and Jenny probably had good inten­tions, but they founded their relationship on our culture’s defective attitudes and patterns for romance.

Unfortunately, even in their adulthood they continue to reap the consequences.

The following “seven habits of highly defective dating” are some of the “swerves” dating relationships often make.

Perhaps you can relate to one or two of them.

(I know I can!)

 

1.

Dating leads to intimacy but not necessarily to commitment

 

Jayme was a junior in high school; her boyfriend, Troy, was a senior.

Troy was everything Jayme ever wanted in a guy, and for eight months they were inseparable.

But two months before Troy left for college, he abruptly announced that he didn’t want to see Jayme anymore.

“When we broke up it was definitely the toughest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Jayme told me afterward.

Even though they’d never physically gone beyond a kiss, Jayme had completely given her heart and emotions to Troy.

Troy had enjoyed the intimacy while it served his needs but then rejected her when he was ready to move on.

Does Jayme’s story sound familiar to you?

Perhaps you’ve heard something similar from a friend, or maybe you’ve experi­enced it yourself.

Like many dating relationships, Jayme and Troy’s became intimate with little or no thought about commit­ment or how either of them would be affected when it ended.

We can blame Troy for being a jerk, but let’s ask ourselves a question.

What’s really the point of most dating relationships?

Often dating encourages intimacy for the sake of intimacy— two people getting close to each other without any real inten­tion of making a long-term commitment.

Deepening intimacy without defining a level of commitment is plainly dangerous.

It’s like going mountain climbing with a partner who isn’t sure that she wants the responsibility of hold­ing your rope.

When you’ve climbed two thousand feet up a mountain face, you don’t want to have a conversation about how she feels “tied down” by your relationship.

In the same way, many people experience deep hurt when they open them­selves up emotionally and physically only to be abandoned by others who proclaim they’re not ready for “serious commit­ment.”

An intimate relationship is a beautiful experience that God wants us to enjoy But He has made the fulfillment of intimacy a byproduct of commitment-based love.

You might say that inti­macy between a man and a woman is the icing on the cake of a relationship headed toward marriage.

And if we look at intimacy that way, then most dating relationships are pure icing.

They usually lack a purpose or clear destination.

In most cases, espe­cially in high school, dating is short term, serving the needs of the moment.

People date because they want to enjoy the emo­tional and even physical benefits of intimacy without the responsibility of real commitment.

In fact, that’s what the original revolution of dating was all about.

Dating hasn’t been around forever.

As I see it, dating is a product of our entertainment-driven, “disposable-everything” American culture.

Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently

 

At the turn of the twentieth century a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry.

If a young man spent time at a girl’s home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her.

But shifting attitudes in cul­ture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes.

The new “rules” allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having any intention of marriage.

Author Beth Bailey documents these changes in a book whose title, From Front Porch to Backseat, says everything about the differ­ence in society’s attitude when dating became the norm.