How To Know If You Should Marry Him Or Her by Pastor Mildred Kingsley-Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

You Can't Do Marriage Without Prayer

There's a class of people we always skip — those already in courtship, wondering whether to move forward. Before anything else, I want to help you fine-tune where you already are. Somebody can check every box on paper and still not be right for you, and prayer is where you find that out. We are spirit beings — some of us are trying to reason our way to an answer, but you can know simply by staying in a place of prayer and asking heaven directly: is this the one for me? God will respond — sometimes affirming it, sometimes showing you an area that needs work, sometimes opening your eyes to something the two of you are heading toward that you haven't seen yet.

My Own Story

In my final year of school, I entered a relationship with a good Christian man, a fellow medical student. I prayed about it beforehand, but there was only silence. When God is silent, He has answered you — if He hasn't said yes, that's your no. But I over-spiritualized it, told myself he hadn't said no, and went ahead anyway. The relationship made sense on paper: he was becoming a doctor, which mattered to me for personal medical reasons; he was romantic, attentive, and completely devoted. We had a plan — I'd finish my master's, we'd marry, and I'd move with him to the UK.

Then one morning, God said, "I want to speak to you." I went to my room to worship and pray, not asking for anything, just spending time with Him — which is something we're losing in the body of Christ; we've started treating God like an ATM instead of a Father we simply want to be with. As I prayed, a CD in the player switched on by itself to a song about trusting God even with what you hold most dear. I finished, and picked up my Bible, which fell open to the story of the woman at the well in John 4 — where Jesus tells her, "Go, call thy husband," and when she says she has none, He tells her she's had five, and the one she's currently with is not her own. It was as clear as day: the man I was with was not my husband.

I was broken — how do you break up with someone who did nothing wrong to you? I told God I couldn't be the one to end it, so instead I prayed that He would make my boyfriend break up with me. Days later, on the phone, out of nowhere, he said, "I don't know why I feel like I'm losing you," and ended the relationship himself. I later learned, through a direct question God prompted me to ask in a similar situation afterward — "If you were a pastor, would you marry me?" — that a person's honest answer to a question like that reveals more than months of declarations of love ever will.

Don't Let a Checklist of Preferences Blind You

I had my own list of non-negotiables — I wouldn't marry a pastor, I would only marry a man from a specific ethnic background, of a certain complexion, without much body hair. I told God, "You can give me anything, just not those things." Some of the specific preferences we cling to are exactly what keeps us from recognizing what God is actually saying — you can miss a genuinely great person because they don't fit a box you built out of preference rather than principle. When I met the man who became my husband, my guard was down precisely because he didn't fit any of my "requirements" — which meant I was finally free to actually see him.

The Four W's of Courtship

• Is it Worship? If being with this person reduces your devotion to God, or makes you want to sin rather than grow, that is the answer — regardless of how attractive, successful, or well-regarded they are. Your relationship should have a higher purpose than just the two of you being happy; it should glorify God.
• Is it Working? Courtship is rehearsal for marriage, without the physical intimacy. If it isn't working now, in courtship, it will not start working after the wedding — that's a lie people tell themselves. Focus honestly on roles and needs, not just feelings.
• Is it Worth It? People ask far more questions before accepting a job than before entering a marriage. Is there a reward here? Is there progress? If being with someone drains your time, energy, and resources without any return, and courtship is where you're still free to leave, that's the moment to ask honestly whether it's worth continuing.
• Is it Word-ruled? Your relationship should be governed by scripture, not by culture, social media trends, or family tradition. Whatever question comes up — should we live together before marriage, should we marry outside our faith, how should we handle finances — go first to what the word actually says, not to what feels normal in your circle.

Ephesians 5 as a Simple Instruction

Ephesians 5:33 — "let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband." Marriage is too heavy for one person to carry — if you find yourself doing all the chasing, all the giving, all the loving, and the other person is only ever receiving, that relationship is not ready to move into marriage. Both people have to be pouring into it for it to work.

Every human being submits to something already — a traffic light, a hairdresser, a boss at work — usually without complaint, because submission there costs little and clearly benefits us. Complaints about submission in marriage are almost always really about the character of the specific person being submitted to, not a rejection of the principle itself. A husband who genuinely loves and cares for his wife rarely meets resistance to being honored.

Practicing the Word Instead of Personal Terms

Men and women are fundamentally different in how they think, talk, and process the world — which is exactly why marriage is a miracle when it works, and why it cannot run on either partner's personal preferences alone. When my husband and I disagree, the only thing that actually resolves it is going back to what scripture says rather than continuing to insist on our own way — years of "I'm not agreeing" changes nothing; trying God's way is what actually moves things forward.

Praying for Your Spouse, Not Just About Them

There's a real difference between praying about your spouse — essentially complaining to God about everything they're doing wrong — and praying for them, which is asking God to shape them and, just as often, to change your own perspective first. When I started, I stopped rehearsing my husband's faults to God and instead began declaring, from scripture, the kind of man I believed God wanted him to be — that he would be sound in judgment, prosperous in what his hands found to do, self-controlled with money. It didn't change overnight, or even in a year or two, but over time I watched it happen. God typically starts by changing how you see the person, before He changes anything about the person himself.

Learning Self-Control

Prayer has also been the thing that helped me get a grip on a hot temper. Anger left unchecked in a marriage does real damage — it is a spirit that, left unmanaged, will use you rather than the other way around. Learning to control myself, rather than assuming I was simply "passionate" or "expressive," was one of the hardest and most necessary lessons prayer taught me, and it protected both my marriage and my ministry in ways I wouldn't have predicted going in.