Identification of Your Particular Man or Woman

M-5B

1. The first was the precedent of creation where God created the woman and specifically brought her to man. He didn't run around looking for her. God brought her to him.
   
   
2. Then the analogy to church truth: as Jesus Christ is the Lord of the church, so each woman has that man whom, as Sarah called Abraham "lord," she may call "lord."
   
   
3. Then from Jeremiah 31, we found that the right partners have bodies, including a new thing that God has brought on the scene. In Jeremiah 31:22, the right partners have bodies which are designed to fit each other alone.
   
   
4. Then in 1 Corinthians 11:7, we found the right woman becomes the glory of the right man. This relationship can only exist when the right people are related to one another. Then the woman becomes the man's glory.
   
   
5. Then the long passage in Ezekiel 16 showed us that soul and sex love cannot fully be achieved apart from the right person. So there are many people in the world that you could marry, but the real and ultimate satisfactions only come when the right people have been put together.
   
   
6. We have found also that the woman is designed therefore to respond fully to just one man. She can respond to others, but the fullest response can only be to the right one.
   
   
7. Then we also found that the response of the right partners sexually outside of themselves will destroy their souls, and in time their bodies. God has built-in restrictions and devices that cause both of these things to happen. You just have to read your newspapers. There was a recent article this week in the National Observer on the rampant quality of social diseases, and this gives evidence that God destroys the body when the wrong partners are related.
   
   
8. The divine order of monogamy confirms that God's plan is to have right partners. God does not intend for there to be more than one, so monogamy is the order. A very prominent actress the other day said that this is the most ridiculous thing in the world--that two people should get married and then expect to stay together for the rest of their lives. She said, at best, a couple can go for about three or four years and then it's time for a change. And, all of you would know her name. She's very prominent and very influential.
   
   
9. One final point was that happiness is derived from a right marriage combination apart from other factors. We're going to go a little more into happiness in the future, but the significance of that is that from the book of Ecclesiastes, we found that the man who lives in all of his vanity, his life is nothing. It's empty. And yet, if he's married to the right woman, he finds happiness and joy in that.

Some of you might be inclined after you hear some of the guidelines we will point out here and things that you've already heard, you may be inclined to start whining and become a cry baby about your lot in life and about the choice that you made. But this is an insult to God for you to cry over your wrong move. The procedure is to confess it which means tell it to God; then to forget it; and, then isolate the sin so that it no longer influences you. Then your outlet is to turn to receiving the doctrine of the Word of God in such a degree and with such positive response that you develop spiritual maturity to the extent that you, where you were once insensitive to the Word of God that led you into that mistake, you will now become very sensitive to the Word of God, and He will be able to reweave your life in a different direction of happiness. It will not be as good as the original could have been had you made the right choice, but it will be a very delightful and happy experience in spite of your wrong choice.

So don't get ready to jump overboard and to abandoned ship if you think that you've made the wrong move. Perhaps you were fortunate in spite of your ignorance of the Word, in spite of the callousness upon your soul, you may have lucked out and still ended up with the right person. Many times people who divorce do so to their regret later to discover that they really were married to the right person.

Death

Now there are some identifying signals, and that's what we want to look at now, whereby you can identify who God's choice is for you. Now this is something more than going out with a girl and asking her how many children she'd like to have, or what kind of furniture she'd like in your house, or where she'd like to live, or how many trees in the back yard. That kind of gobbledygook does not identify too much as to who the real person is. As a matter of fact, I would caution you that if you're under 22 or 23, you don't know enough to spot God's choice anyhow so sit back and relax. There are plenty of people who can testify to you that that is real good sense. That is one of the smartest things you have ever heard. There is nothing so inane and nothing so depressing and nothing so sad as a teenage marriage or somebody who hasn't really moved far enough into their twenties to get a hold of life so that they can identify the signals. But there are some identifying signals that reveal your particular man and woman:

1. Spiritual Maturity

   The first and the best signal to your particular person is spiritual maturity. This is the greatest protection you can have of coming up with the right person. Spiritual maturity. Here is a Christian who has learned the Word of God and has taken it with a positive attitude. So you've developed a good conscience. I remind you again that your mind has two segments to it. It has the perceptive side where you learn things, and it has the conscience side. In the conscience side, you have the compartment of your frame of reference where you have certain standards, certain ideals, and certain values that you develop. In your conscience you also have divine viewpoint. Now down in your human spirit, what you have learned of the Word of God has gone into your perceptive mind. You have taken it by positive volition and it has been transferred down as storage into your human spirit. There God speaks to you and there God leads you. From this, it is cycled back up to your conscience in order to create a frame of reference, in order to give you a divine viewpoint. This, in turn, directs your thinking. This is why we have so much fouled up thinking in the nation today politically. It's because the nation's conscience has become so disoriented from the truth of the Word of God. When this was a godly nation that was steeped in the Word of God, it was constantly being given instructions from the human spirit so that the soul could be guided by the conscience.

   Now this is a major factor if you're going to pick the right person in marriage. Your spiritual IQ is dependent entirely upon your reception to the Word of God. You should be exposing yourself to the study of the Word and to receiving it. Everybody has equal ground to learn the Word no matter what your physical I.Q. is. If you are a spiritual dummy, you're not going to have much chance, I'll guarantee you, of finding the right person in marriage. If you do, boy you have lucked out, and that's all. And if you're not married right now, I hope I can throw a real fear of concern in your heart that you take a respect toward the Word of God and the opportunity to receive it as you've never had before. If you want to give yourself a lot of built-in misery, just get tied up to the wrong person in marriage. The best insurance is developing this conscience with the right frame of reference and God's point of view so that the signals that are going to your mind, then over to this right woman, and they bounce back like radar and say, "That's it. She's the one." And this is the finest protection a young person can have.

   Along with this, you will wait by faith upon the Lord. You will not run around looking, trying out, and searching. You will wait till He sends the identifying signals. When you have this structure of maturity in your soul, it will give you the kind of guidance in your thinking, your emotions, and your will, as a result of your taking in the Word of God, that you will in all likelihood be sure to make the right choice. Incidentally, if you get the right woman, and of course if she has spiritual maturity in her soul, it's going to be easier than ever to locate her. But if you get the right woman, and get a woman who's got spiritual maturity in her soul, my dear friend, you have double blessing. You will have a wife who has fantastic discernment and understanding, particularly in the roles that she has to fill, for example, as being a mother. She will, for example, find a personal dignity because she has the Word of God and because she has perception. She will have great divine viewpoint perception.

   For example, when she tells that little kid in your home to carry out the garbage, she will have such personal dignity that she'll keep her mouth shut when this kid tries to debate with her, to con her out of it, to delay, and to excuse himself. She will have the personal dignity not to talk back to him at all. She will never lower herself to carrying on an exchange with this little kid about carrying out the garbage. Instead, she will look him in the eye and she'll have a shootout with him eyeball-to-eyeball right then. And do you know what this kid's going to learn? He's going to learn where the boundaries are really quickly.

   Most kids learn that when their mother says, "I want you to carry the garbage out, Sam," he can go around twiddling his thumbs then. Then she says, "Now, Sam, didn't I tell you to carry the garbage out?" He says, "Yes ma'am, you did." He again goes on with whatever he was doing. And pretty soon her voice is getting higher. She says, "This is the last time, Sam, that I'm going to tell you to carry the garbage out." So she says five "last times" like somebody giving an invitation in church. During the 17th verse, the preacher says, "Last verse, folks. Anybody who wants to get into heaven, this is your chance. I'm going to slam the door then. I'm not kidding you." Well pretty soon she begins screaming and yelling, and she throws things at him. Then he knows that he's reached the end of the trail. Now he knows that she's going to come over and whack him down. And that's when he carries the garbage out. But Sam has learned that it will take about seven or eight last times, and then once she starts screaming, then he better move.

   I'm telling you if you have a woman that's got developed spiritual maturity in her soul, you have double blessing because everything will fit and coordinate. You will have a minimum of conflicts. Conflicts come when somebody on the team has a fracture in spiritual maturity. It's not that they don't know anything. They may know all the Bible in the world, and they may have been around a long time as Christians. I'm talking about the fact that they can say, "Yes" to what God has said. That develops a person with dignity. This is what Jesus Christ had. This is why the people said, "You know we listen to our rabbis. They're all smart boys. They've been down to the big university in Jerusalem. But when Jesus Christ speaks, He talks with authority. These Joe's don't." That comes from spiritual maturity in your soul. So this is number one if you want to get the right person.

2. Soul Contact

   There is the guide of soul contact. We have a very lovely book in the Bible that's a love story. It's a story of marital love. It's a reflection of the love that exists between God, Christ, and the church. It's the book of the Song of Solomon. We're going to be looking at several indications from this book. First, Song of Solomon 1:7: "Tell me, O whom my soul loves, where you eat, where you make your flock to rest at noon. For why should I be like one who turns aside by the flocks of your companions?" Notice the expression "you whom my soul loves". If it is the right man, if it is the right woman, this is the first signal you will have that you are not getting kicks because of the physical charms of this skirt, but you are getting signals from her soul. It is the soul of this woman that has captured your attention--her thinking, her emotions, and her will. "You whom my soul loves."

   Genuine physical love always has to begin on the soul level or it's not real. Now when you have the right person in your soul, that man will occupy that woman's mind. She'll think about him all the time. Her emotions will be pursuing him. They'll be responding to him. They'll be constantly expressing themselves in one way or another toward him. If he's her man, she'll seek to please him. She'll find that her conscience agrees with his conscience, and many conflicts are removed. Here's where your frame of reference and your divine viewpoint is. If you can't coordinate with a person conscience-to-conscience, you're going to have troubles. The guide of social contact. This person may cause you trials or they may cause you joy, but they still remain in your soul.

   This current stress that we have upon sex and promiscuity in our society blocks out the contact of the soul. This is what physical immorality does. It destroys your conscience. It destroys all the areas of the soul. Consequently, because young people in our society are suffering from this destruction of soul, they try to bring themselves back to reality with drugs. That's where the drug scene fits in. Somehow this takes them out beyond themselves to that real feeling that they sense must be there, that a Christian experiences when he is oriented to the Word of God. So they try to fill this void, this lack of soul reality, with drugs, or with sensitivity training where people gather in little circles and fondle each other so they can break down their inhibitions and be open to one another. It's trying to grasp what they have lost in their souls. The result of our society is that body love dominates the thought patterns and so we're oblivious to the warnings of the soul, so people get matched up wrong. Everything in our society--TV, movies, what you read, and prominent opinions--all work on the basis that the body is the big thing. The secret of sex fulfillment is in the soul, not the body.

   Now once the soul receives contact with the right one, it's like a picture. It's like a photograph on the soul. That photograph will never leave you. Once the right man has been impressed upon the right woman's soul, she'll never forget him even if she marries someone else. So if you're a teenager, you need to keep your soul clear so that your conscience, which acts as a radar screen, can be suited to picking up the signal that God is ready to give you some day, instead of clouding up your radar with a lot of false images. You should have standards and values built into your soul. This is why guidelines are important. You may fall in love with someone, but unless you have guidelines in your soul, you will not know that that is the right person. You can fall in love and have a great emotional attachment with entirely the wrong person.

   You may meet your particular man or particular woman in your teens, but God will not confirm that person as that to you until you have come into the maturity of your early 20s. When the right ones get together, there's little tendency to wander off to somebody else. The sole tie is always greater than the physical tie. So number two: you can identify the right person by the soul contact--how this person fits into your emotions, your will, and to your mentality, and you will know that this person has expressed himself on your soul.

3. Knowledge

   If you're going to find the right person, there's another thing you need. That is knowledge. Song of Solomon 1:2: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for your love is better than wine." There's certain knowledge which is needed to find the right person. Ignorance about the nature of the opposite sex leads to wrong choices. Here she says, "Your love is better than wine." In the Old Testament world, people were aware of the fact that wine has a variety of qualities. The comparison here is to this one who is her lover as she is his lover. The variety of this person, if it is the right person, has the varieties in the qualities of good wines. To this person, the right one is better than anybody else. So women should know something about men, about their variations, as men should know about women.

   A woman should know about the Don Juan character--this guy who thinks himself very irresistible to the ladies. I once had a father in this church who told me about his teenage son. He said, "I just had so much trouble with this boy and the girls. But you know he's just so good looking. The girls chase him all the time." So he acted the real Don Juan role. Well, Solomon was the kind of a fellow that looked very much of a desirable prospect. But you remember that Solomon lined himself up with a thousand wives and concubines, and that kind of promiscuity destroyed his soul. It calloused him toward responses to God's point of view.

   Some people think that sex experiences are valuable before marriage so that you become a good lover. The world likes to give you that line all the time. That's the greatest lie out of hell yet. It's the right man and the right woman together that make good lovers--not experience. Don't you ever fall for that line. That is Satan's way of destroying your soul so that your radar is off the beam. Don't fall for the line when you date a man and he indicates to you that he wants repayment for the evening out that he has given you, and so he wants you to kiss him good night, or he wants you to repay him with some necking. Some women are wise enough right off the bat. They don't repay with goodies like that. When somebody wants to do that, you just spot him that he's the wrong man for you. Women are sensitive. They're smart once they're informed. So knowledge is important.

4. Security

   To a woman, there is this quality of security that's a signal that she's met her right man. Song of Solomon 2:4: "He brought me to the banqueting house (that is, he took me out to dinner) and his banner over me was love." The "banner over me" is a standard of protection literally. Her particular man has the attitude of protection to her and toward her. Now this is when he's with her. But look at Song of Solomon 1:13 when he's not with: "A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto to me. He shall lie all night between my breasts." Now it should not read, "He shall lie," but, "It shall lie all night between my breasts." What this refers to is a bag of perfume, a scent bag which was worn in the ancient world by the woman as she slept, and the point of it was to perfume the body.

   Now the comparison here is that to her, her beloved is as a scent bag. Her particular man evokes a sweet memory to her when he is not there. He is present in her soul. This provides for her, even when he is absent, a sense of security. Just when she thinks of this guy, it's a delight to her soul. It's like a whiff of delightful perfume, and it evokes all kinds of delightful remembrances of him. There is a warm glow and a warm feeling of security even when he's not there. Now ladies, the man who is not a fragrant memory when he is absent is not your right man. A sense of satisfied memories provides the woman with security. A woman doesn't think about a man that she's indifferent toward. She doesn't think about him at all. It's a good sign that he's the wrong one. There are some things that may anger you about even your right man, but you're still going to think about him. So there's the sense of security. When he's there, you're aware that he's protective of you and he's providing for you. When he's absent, he's a fragrant memory.

5. Volition

   There is the guide of volition. Song of Solomon 2:7: "I charge you daughters of Jerusalem by the roes and by the hinds of the field that you stir not up nor awake my love till he please." It should read, "till she please." "Please" is a word indicating an act of the will. The love of the right people always involves the act of their free wills. Unless a woman can freely choose a man, without coercion, he's the wrong man for her. So if you meet a man or if you meet a woman, who deals with you on a coercive basis, that's not your right one. The right man knows that what a woman does not give freely from her will, eagerly and willingly, is worthless. The woman, even in her role as responder, when she meets her particular man, she is aggressive in that response. She's a responder but she's aggressive at it. Aggressive at what? At pleasing him. Sometimes you'll hear a woman say, "I work at it." Or, "I would work at it. When we're married, I'm going to work at it." What she means is she's going to be aggressive in pleasing. If you're not enthusiastic about pleasing a man, he's the wrong man. There has to be the freedom of gladly given expression.

6. Voice Delight

   The next signal is the guide of voice delight. Song of Solomon 2:8: "The voice of my beloved! (Exclamation point!) Behold he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills." You can almost feel, "The Sound of Music" here--the very line, "The hills are alive with the sound of music." This evokes a delightful response from her again. How do you feel about your love's voice? There is an exhilarating reaction to the sound of your right woman or your right man. If the voice of some prospect you're dating irritates you, you've got the wrong person. You better believe it. I'm fascinated by a current TV ad--a lady who's selling a deodorant. I'm fascinated by her voice. I don't think she could ever be my right woman. (It's so high-pitched, twangy, cackly, and nasal.) I sit there and I'm fascinated by that voice. That's the kind of voice that you hear coming over the hills and you go the other direction. "The voice of my beloved." When he's your real one, you get excited about his voice. Voice sensitivity picks up signals of meaning that only the right people know with each other.

7. Physical Response

   Then there's the guide of physical response. Song of Solomon 2:6: "His left hand is under my head and his right hand does embrace me." The right woman delights in the physical caresses of the right man when he's present. This is because their soul relationship has prepared her to respond to his physical love. If you are not eager to share your body with some particular man or some particular woman, then he's your wrong person. This is what 1 Corinthians 7:3 means: "Let the husband render unto the wife her due." The word "due" means sex. "And likewise also the wife unto the husband. If you recoil from the idea of physical response, that's a great sign that that's the wrong person.

   Notice Song of Solomon 8:3: "His left hand should be under my head and his right hand should embrace me." The italics indicate that those words are not in Hebrew, so it literally says, "His left hand under my head, his right hand should embrace me." This time he's not there. This time the lover is absent, but the memory of him, and the memory of his caress, and the memory of his physical embrace is so delightful and so welcome to her that she thinks about it and looks forward to the next time when he's there. Some women just wouldn't kiss the same guy twice. That's a signal. He may smell bad. He may taste bad. He may just be too hairy. But if you find you can't respond on a physical level, he's the wrong person. She's the wrong gal.

   Song of Solomon 3:1: "By night on my bed I sought him who my soul loves. I sought him but I found him not." He who is in her soul, because he is her right man, she misses physically when he's not there. I warn you that this is not that thing we talked about before as being the waves of libido, these waves of physical desire. Libido is just physical desire in general, and it does not zero in on a particular person. It can just be toward a variety of different people one after another. You shouldn't marry on that kind of a wave. But this is not what the Holy Spirit is talking about here concerning her in Song of Solomon 3:1. This is what 1 Corinthians 7:9 is speaking of: "But if they cannot have self-control, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn." The word "burn" here is physical desire zeroed in on one and one only. If you're smart enough you will recognize certain personal indications of that one and only, and that kind of desire that zeros in--a reaction that does not take place with anyone else. It is not mere general desire of the libido type. This is toward a particular one.

   Furthermore, it is constant. It is not a sometime thing. Libido comes and goes. You get excited toward one person this week, and next week you've forgotten all about him. What he's talking about here is that the guide of physical response is constant. It is not toward many, but it triggers in a woman a desire toward a man for a total surrender to him. She sees in this man an aggressiveness and a passion toward her, and she senses that it is exclusive. That's a signal to him, but it is also a signal to her. Her reception in marriage is complete. If you don't see this kind of a signal yourself or in the man that you're thinking of marrying, the guide of this kind of physical response, this kind of the delight on that level, then it's not the right person.

8. Love Sickness

   The next one is love sickness. Your true love will make you sick with love. Song of Solomon 2:5: "Sustain me with cakes of raisins, comfort me with apples for I am sick with love." She's not sick of love, but sick with love. She's lovesick. She references raisin cakes because she feels faint to restore her strength. Apples were used in the ancient world as smelling salts. When people were faint, they would cut an apple open and let them smell that. It had a reviving effect, particularly if it was a little bit ripe. Song of Solomon 5:8 says, "I charge you O daughters of Jerusalem that if you find my beloved that you tell him that I am sick with love." Here is a message to her absent lover, longing for him. She's just lovesick. She feels it in her soul and she's upset physically over it. When love can't be returned because the object of that affection is absent, then a person has a sick reaction. I don't care how old you are either. This is for any age. When the object of your affection, your real particular man or woman is absent, there's a love sickness toward that person because the love you have cannot be responded to while that person is away.

9. Mutual Recognition

   Mutual recognition is another sign. Song of Solomon 6:3: "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine. He feeds among the lilies." "My beloved" is a sign for her particular man. "Is mine" indicates a clear recognition that he is her particular man. She knows that he has recognized her as his particular woman. In Song of Solomon 7:10, she says, "I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me." There we have that physical response again. He wants her as his wife exclusively from all the others. His interest is in her. It's mutually evident to them. Now if you don't have that kind of a mutual recognition, it's not the right person.

Jealousy

There are more neurotic people and mental derangements because of this mental sin perhaps than anything else except maybe pride. Here is what shows up: You find a person with revenge tactics. The jealous one is revenging: the attempt to hurt; the attempt just to make the person uncomfortable; to keep pressures on them; to aggravate; or, to demand attention. Jealousy has a variety of expressions, and your particular brand will have its own particular expression. But while love is as strong as death, it can be knocked out by the cruel thing of jealousy. Jealousy is as cruel as the grave itself. The grave can rob you of your loved one. But jealousy will rob you of your right man and right woman love. The result will be that you are not able to respond. You may have been born with jealousy which you have in your old sin nature, and that's why you act that way, or you may never be jealous because you don't care about anybody. But all of a sudden, somebody comes along, and then you start practicing jealousy over somebody that you care about. It will devastate the experience of love.

You may be single and you may have the characteristic of jealousy. Remember that this is one of the guidelines that we said you should never marry a jealous person. You'll have a very hellish experience if you marry a jealous man or woman. If you are a jealous person and you're not married, then God is giving you in his grace some time to overcome this. Here's what it will do to you. Even if your radar locks in on the right gal or the right man, you'll destroy what you have because of this single sin alone. The grave is cruel because it takes what is precious to us. Jealousy will take what may even be more precious. And you cannot beat this sin. So quit excusing yourself and quit justifying and quit playing around that somehow you have a reason that is justifiable for this attitude on your part. God says that you will destroy your right particular man or right particular woman's love if you don't confess, remove, and get enough Bible doctrine into your soul that you can get over the cheap role of being jealous.

Dear father, we ask you to help us to grasp these things. Help these young people to think them through--not just to have studied them now--but to think them through until it becomes second nature to them down in the subconscious without even thinking, that these signals will rise up and ring the bells of reality when in Your good time You will cross their paths with the one whom you have selected for each of them. For we pray in Jesus dear name. Amen.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1970

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