I began this past weekend's message by apologizing to a very large group of people at CVC.
I said, "Weekends at church might be one of the lonely times of the week for you. Why? Because most of us see church as couples' and families' world. Messages, announcements, even the way Community Groups are structured can communicate that singles are not really part of the program. If we have ever come across that way here, I am sorry."
The US Census Bureau gives us some stats about unmarried Americans.
The number of unmarried Americans 18 and older is 95.9 million – almost 100 million. That’s 43 percent of all adult Americans. There are about 60 million people in America over the age of 18 who have never been married. Over 20 million Americans have been divorced. And about 15 million Americans have been widowed. And unmarried, single America is growing rapidly. 17 percent of American households in 1970 were made up of people living alone. Now that number is 28 percent.
So, as our creative team thought about our "Thrive" series for the family, we thought it would be important for us to spend at least one weekend talking about thriving as a single person.
I anticipated that some married people would be thinking, "Hey, Rick, I’m not single. I’m married. Why should I listen to this message?"
My answer? "Well, many of us who are now married may one day be single, God forbid, through death or divorce. You need to know what god says about singleness if that should ever happen to you. If you are a teenager who’s planning on marrying, someday, chances are you’ll spend some time as a single person before you say “I do.” It’s loving for us to know what the struggles and challenges are that our single brothers and sisters face. We need to know how to encourage and support them. So, listen up today."
As a single person you might be thinking, "If only I was married, then I would be thriving. I don’t think it’s possible for me to be happy until I say 'I do.' I am all alone in this world. And I can’t thrive. If only I was married…"
God's word has something to say about that. The man that wrote the words in I Corinthians 7 was a spiritual leader named Paul. He wrote to a group of Christ-followers in a city in the ancient world called Corinth. And they had questions about marriage and sex and divorce and remarriage and children and singleness. We picked out the verses dealing with singleness.
God's word says that as a single you can thrive when you see singleness as a good gift. I Corinthians 7:7-9.
It is not God's will for everyone to be married.
I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am (I Cor. 7:7-8).
We’re going to see why He says this later.
Question: Is singleness for everyone? Absolutely not.
But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion... (I Corinthians 7:9).
Some should seek marriage and some should not.
Paul was simply echoing the words of Jesus. "For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it" (Matthew 19:12).
In the ancient world, kings had harem – a big group of wives and mistresses. Harems were often managed by men. But the king wanted to make sure the man who managed his harem wouldn’t be tempted to have sex with the women. So, an operation would be performed so the man could not have sex. And men like that were called eunuchs.
Jesus is saying that there are three groups of singles or eunuchs. First, ‘from birth’ refers to those are born without the ability to have sex. This is rare. Second, eunuchs “made by men” refers to this ancient practice of performing an operation so the man couldn’t have sex. Third, those who “made themselves eunuchs” doesn’t describe someone who mutilates himself. It’s using the term to describe someone who could marry but chooses not to for a very specific reason. Notice that Jesus says they do it “for the sake of the kingdom.” They say, “I’m not getting married because I want to focus on building the Kingdom of God.
You know, the great Christian leader Paul was one of those people. And so was Jesus. Single for the sake of the kingdom.
“How do I know if I have the gift or not?”
If you ask this question with fear or horror, it probably means that you do not have the gift of being single for your entire life here on earth. In some cases, it may be that God gives the gift for a person to remain unmarried for a season and then later in life provides a marriage partner.
Look again at verses 7 and 8. Singleness is a gift and it’s good. A good gift. We should not see singles as second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. Their gift is a desirable gift in the life of the church. It’s a good gift. It comes from a loving Father who seeks to give the very best gifts to His children.
Both marriage and singleness are gifts from God. To some, He gives the gift of marriage; to others, He gives the gift of singleness. Either way, we are to receive our marital status as a gift.
If you have the “if onlys” – “if only I was married” – see singleness as a gift. That’s the way to thrive.
6 comments:
Enjoyed discovering your blog. I just listed it in a post on my "Living Single" blog under "some promising new discoveries":
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/200909/singles-week-spins-out-control
--Bella DePaulo
Well, a second apology might be in order for having told the single people in your congregation that singleness is a gift, when it's not!
Both Paul and Christ were suggesting that it's a rare and special thing that someone can choose to remain single for the sake of doing kingdom work. For those individuals, singleness might be a gift, but it's inappropriate to put that label on all singleness for a number of reasons.
First of all, there are people who are single involuntarily, and to call their unwanted singleness as gift is disingenous and patronizing, just as it would be to call infertility a gift. I understand that these things do happen under God's sovereignty, but that does not mean they are "gifts". Just look up the word "gift" in a concordance and see for yourself what the scriptures do and do not call a gift.
Secondly, there are people (even Christians) who are single, but not for godly reasons. Some prefer to "play the field", or have issues with the opposite sex. To call their singleness a gift is undue flattery.
We live in a culture and a time that puts both temptations and obstacles in the way of young people getting married, so it really isn't fitting to assume that because someone isn't married that they have the "gift of singleness", as if that's God's will or plan for their lives. Again, all happen under God's sovereignty, but we need to be careful how we construe one happening or another as "God's will".
Part of the misunderstanding about the "gift of singleness" comes from that phrase being coined by the editors of the Living Bible (now the NLT) in the 70's. Because of the problems described above, they recently had that phrase removed from 1 Cor 7:7, restoring it to something closer to the original Greek.
Thanks for the conversation, JAM. I hope you read the rest of the posts to get the full message to singles that we gave a couple of Sundays ago. We're not saying that singleness is a gift in a technical sense like those listed in I Cor 12, Romans 12, and Eph 4. But jsut as every experience in life is a gift from a sovereign God, so are the experiences of singles. The best way for all of us to go through life with a sense of joy in the midst of pain is to see it all as "Father-filtered."
Yes, I did read the rest of your blog and I posted quite a few comments because many your ideas reflect a mid-20th century trend towards seeing all singleness as a gift, which has since been theologically disproven and corrected.
As I said in my last post to you, not every experience in life is a gift from God, biblically speaking. Some experiences occur as a consequence of our behavior, as a society or as individuals. I don't think you understand that there are many faithful believers (women especially) who are missing out on marriage today, due to the dearth of young single men in our churches. Calling the singleness of either group only serves to whitewash a situation that require our collective and individual repentance.
Repentance also involves taking corrective action. Speaking of action, the scriptures never treat marriage as something God just gives to people, it's always spoken of in terms of human volition and effort: Proverbs 18:22 "a man FINDS a wife and receives favor", 1 Cor 7:8 "if they cannot contain, let them marry", "he can do as he wishes" 1 Cor 7:33, "she is free to marry whoever she wishes" 1 Cor 7:36. Even if marriage does happen under God's sovereignty, the scriptures do not encourage us to think in terms of divine mate finding or "waiting on the Lord" to be "called" to singleness or marriage. Indeed, marriage and singleness are never regarded in terms of "calling", but something people are free to choose.
Unfortunately, there are numerous obstacles that keep people from marrying in a timely fashion today. And that is what pastors should be helping singles with, not hyping up singleness to be some glorious thing that it isn't.
Hi JAM, I appreciate your passion to use scripture in this conversation. I do think that we might have a different view concerning the extent of God's control over the lives of His people, i.e. the sovereignty of God. Verses like Psalm 115:3, Psalm 135:6, Daniel 4:35, Acts 4:28, Proverbs 19:21, Isaiah 46:11, Proverbs 20:24, Proverbs 21:1, Proverbs 21:30, Job 23:13, Amos 3:6, Psalm 22:28, Psalm 29:10, Psalm 33:11, Deuteronomy 32:39, and II Kings 19:25 encourage me to think that He is in charge over evey experience in life, even the painful ones. Hence, even if one of His people gets cancer - even though cancer is a result of the fall - it's still an experience that God sovereignly allows for His own inscrutable purposes. In the same way, being single or being in a chronically bad marriage can be seen as something that is "Father-filtered." I would never minimize the hurt and pain someone goes through as they fight cancer. My brother is fighting cancer even now. In the same way, I would never minimize the hurt and pain of someone who is single and wants to be married. But as a pastor, I am seeking to help people deal with disappointment with God. He often does not seem to be cooperating with our agenda. If you are interested in where I am coming from, you might want to check out "Shattered Dreams" by Larry Crabb and "Disappointment with God" by Philip Yancy.
I am not a babe in the woods, unfamiliar with the works of Yancey, Crabb or Holy Scripture. Nor am I minimizing the sovereignty of God.
"Hence, even if one of His people gets cancer - even though cancer is a result of the fall - it's still an experience that God sovereignly allows for His own inscrutable purposes"
There's the thing: if God's purposes are inscrutable, then personalized speculation about them is not helpful. My mother died of cancer because, given how God designed lungs, that's what they're likely to get if you inhale cigarette smoke into them --- and that's good enough for me. To say, as John Piper does, that the cancer was personally designed for her (or me, my life) by God goes beyond anything that's written in scripture. Disease, even if it can be used by God, is never called a gift in scripture.
Maybe you're not seeing what I'm getting at because you're trying too hard to preach at me. Much of what has been taught to singles by evangelical churches in the past three decades has not been helpful. Why? Because it's extra-biblical. It goes beyond what scripture actually says. Even Focus on the Family now realizes this, and so they are trying to reform outmoded teachings to singles, like much of what you've written here.
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