Hi, I'm Leslie Lutie and this is the Setaparte podcast, Biblical Encouragement for Women.

To go deeper into today's message, visit us at setapart.org and explore my new 12-week

video course, Honorable Womanhood.

And you can connect with me on Instagram or YouTube at the links in the description.

Now let's dive into today's encouragement.

Hi, I'm Leslie Lutty, host of the Setaparte podcast, Biblical Encouragement for Women.

We've been going through our Honorable Womanhood series where we've been unpacking biblical

truths for singleness, purity, relationships, and marriage.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about overcoming the fear of loneliness, or in other words, letting God be in control, letting him hold the pen of your story. If you haven't caught the first few episodes in this series, I would encourage you to go back and listen to those. They lay a great foundation for everything we're going to be talking about today. Also, we have an event coming up in Colorado at our Ellersley campus, October 24th and 25th, and that is the Honorable Womanhood Retreat. This is going to be a small retreat. So we'll have a lot of time for Q&A and discussion and just diving deeper into these principles. So it's a great opportunity for a mother-daughter getaway or if you're a single woman of any age and you're just looking for a biblical foundation for

this area of your life. This is going to be just a special weekend. So you can go to setapart.org

for more information. Just click on events or there's a link in this description. Let's dive into

overcoming the fear of loneliness. Jesus says in Luke 923, if anyone desires to come after me,

let him deny himself and take up his

cross daily and follow me. I feel like that concept of self-denial and surrender is not really

something that we often apply to romance and relationships. It's difficult in every area of our

lives to surrender and let God be in control. But when it comes to relationships, it's just an

area we often cling to very tightly and feel like we know better for our lives what we want

versus what God wants for us. And the enemy oftentimes makes us think that if we really surrender

control of this area of our life to God, we'll end up miserable and our dreams and desires will fall by the

wayside. One of the things that I had to understand in my single years, and it took me a while to come

to this revelation, is that God was the one who, first of all, created romance in the first place.

He was the one who put these desires for love and companionship in my heart. And so I knew,

...