Gender and Sexuality
Part 4. Singleness: The Gift Few Peoples Want
Singleness, the Gift Few People Want
Pastor Charles Price
If you have got your Bible this morning I am going to read from 1 Corinthians and Chapter 7 - 1 Corinthians Chapter 7. In many ways I would like to read the whole chapter. I am not going to; I am going to read the opening couple of verses and then the last section, though what I have to share with you really comes out of the whole of this chapter.
But in 1 Corinthians Chapter 7 and Verse 1 Paul writes,
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.
“But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.”
Then down to Verse 25:
“Now about virgins…”
(And that word there is used of single people.)
“Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgement as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
“Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for you to remain as you are.
“Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife.
“But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.
“What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.
“I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs – how he can please the Lord.
“But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs; her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world – how she can please her husband.
“I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
“If anyone thinks he is acting improperly toward the virgin he is engaged to, and if she is getting along in years and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married.
“But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin – this man also does the right thing.
“So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does even better.
“A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.
“In my judgement, she is happier if she stays as she is – and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Phew! That’s a very interesting passage.
We have been talking for several weeks about gender and sexuality and I wanted this morning to talk about singleness. And I am calling it “Singleness, the Gift Few People Want”.
I talk about it as a gift because in 1 Corinthians 7:4 [7] (a verse that we didn’t read just now), Paul says,
“I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that gift.”
The “this gift” is the gift of singleness and the “that gift” is the gift of marriage.
We don’t often welcome singleness as a gift. Especially in our younger days we probably fear it more as a fate.
But Paul speaks here about it being a gift. We will come in a few moments to try and understand what he means by that.
Now I am fully aware of the incongruity of somebody who has been married 30 years talking about singleness and its virtues and its struggles. I appreciate that dilemma.
But to some extent all of us can relate to being single because everybody is single at some stage in their lives.
Prior to marriage, of course, we are all single.
I didn’t marry until I was 30 and so I had my whole decade of the 20’s as a single person. I know and recall and remember some of the issues related to that.
Some experience the death of a spouse and there is always one that is left, and they are left to live singly, sometimes for many years – they may or may not remarry. But they may have – and many of you here this morning are living a single life for that reason.
Others go through separation or divorce and you find yourself where you are having to cope again with a single life.
And there are of course some of us who never marry at all.
Statistics Canada tells us that in the last census 51.5% of the adult population of Canada are single. That is the first time since census began in 1871 that there are more single adults in Canada than there are married adults.
And this is not an aberration; this is a trend that has been slowly moving in that direction.
The previous census 49 point something; now it’s over 50%.
And there are different ways that we view singleness, either consciously we have formulated our thoughts about it, or subconsciously we have a certain attitude towards single people.
We may see marriage and singleness as parallel states, each with their particular joys and particular sorrows with their particular benefits and their individual troubles.
Some of us may see singleness not as parallel to marriage but as a second best, that someone who is single is living a deficient life because they have not come into marriage.
I didn’t meet my wife Hilary until I was 28. I had already been four years in full time Christian ministry, a lot of it travelling around speaking at churches and conferences.
And I have to tell you, I got absolutely tired to death of people implying that I needed to settle down and find a wife. I actually got sick of it. Because again and again and again and again people would make statements or ask me questions all of which implied that you need to settle down with a wife because to not do so will somehow be a second best position for you.
And I am sure there are folks here who are single and you too are equally sick to death of that kind of implication, and especially when it comes from fellow Christians.
The third view we may have of singleness is that it is something special, that it is a privilege, that there is a vocation attached to a single life.
Now we of course are an evangelical church, an independent evangelical church. We don’t belong to any great movement but there are religious orders who view singleness and celibacy as a particular calling by God and they embrace it as a privilege. Although there are struggles related to that, they embrace it as a calling from God.
My question today is what does Scripture have to say to the 51.5% of our population who are single? And in particular, in this chapter in 1 Corinthians 7 when Paul is addressing the church in Corinth, what does Scripture have to say to Christian singles? Because it is different to what you might say to the world at large.
Now there are two passages in the New Testament that speak specifically about the single state. One is Jesus in Matthew 19 – I am going to refer to that in a few minutes’ time. And the other is Paul here in 1 Corinthians 7.
Jesus, of course, is the central figure of the whole Bible. He was single.
Paul was the most prolific writer of the New Testament. He was single.
And based on this passage in 1 Corinthians 7 I want to look under three headings really that show a progression from a question that was being asked of Paul through to talking about his own personal issue (and he brings in his own life experience here) to a big issue, a big principle by which all of our lives are to be lived, but which has its very particular bearing on the single life.
So let me start then with the local issue because when Paul writes he is responding to a question that is being raised by the Christians in Corinth. Because in Verse 1 of Chapter 7 he says,
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.”
Now the problem is we don’t know what they had written about. We have two of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians; we have none of the Corinthians’ letters to Paul.
But they had written him a letter in which they had raised a number of questions because he picks this up several times in responding to what they had asked him.
And the answer to one of the questions they had raised with him was, “It is good for a man not to marry” (as my version of the NIV puts it). Though actually the word marry is not in the original text.
Literally it says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” That’s how many of the translations accurately translate it. But touching a woman is clearly a euphemism for sexual intimacy.
The ESV says, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” And then he qualifies it by saying, “But it is good to marry. That’s good as well. But if you are not married, it is not good to have sexual relations with a woman.”
It is therefore very unlikely that the Corinthians had written to Paul and said, “Paul is it okay for a Christian to remain single?” And his answer is, “Absolutely it is okay for a Christian to remain single, in fact it is good to remain single.”
It is highly unlikely that that was the question because Paul himself was single and they knew that. They knew he would affirm that position.
So let me try to reconstruct the question, if you like, that they had asked him.
Corinth was a port city in Greece and it was a city noted for its sexual permissiveness and sexual immorality. The term “a Corinthian woman” was a preverbal phrase for a sexually loose woman. “Oh, she’s a Corinthian woman.”
I have on my desk at home the Oxford English Dictionary and it gives a definition to the word “Corinthianize” and it says, “to Corinthianize is to live licentiously, that is, without morals.”
Corinth was a sexually lax, permissive, hedonistic society and a 21st Century English dictionary still gives that definition of the word Corinthianize because for 20 centuries it has been associated with this lax, licentious, permissive, sexually hedonistic life.
Paul acknowledges this culture in Corinth because in Verse 2 he says,
“Since there is so much immorality…”
And then he says that’s why it’s good for a man to marry.
In Chapter 6 and Verse 9 he talks about the sexually immoral adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexual offenders. And then he says in Verse 11:
“And this is what some of you were.”
“You people sitting in this church, this was your history; this was your lifestyle.” Because this is the culture of Corinth and out in the Corinthian community to be sexually immoral, an adulterer, a prostitute whether male or female or a homosexual offender; that’s exactly the lifestyle that is prevalent in Corinth.
“But,” he went on to say, “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
So this lax morality represented normality and the status quo. It’s what everybody did.
And in light of this, I think a likely question being asked was something like this: In the prevailing culture of sexual freedoms, is it unreasonable to ask Christians to refrain from sexual activity outside of marriage or is it okay for them to have some measure of sexual experience outside of marriage?
I suggest that is likely the spirit of the question that Paul is responding to. And that is a very relevant question to our society today.
I received an e-mail this week in the light of what I have said in the last couple of Sundays. I received an e-mail that said this:
“In the light of our changing world and the availability of contraception, are the circumstances not different now to the New Testament day and why is it not legitimate to engage in a responsible sexual relationship before marriage?”
Now I had that question this week. I suggest the question Paul had received was in that kind of vein.
And here is his answer.
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. But since there is so much immorality each man should have his own wife, and each wife her own husband.”
That is the context, says Paul, for the sexual relationship as God has ordained it.
Now this is a very real question because sexual morals have changed so much in recent decades. The casual relationships in our culture are fairly normalized.
The Globe and Mail in April carried an article on the hook-up culture of single young people. To hook up is to engage in casual relationships that involve some form of sexual activity.
And in a survey of college students that this article is actually based on in the Globe and Mail, a survey of college students across Canada, 80% of students had engaged in a hook-up relationship at least once.
Now it didn’t mean it involved sexual intercourse necessarily but it involved some measure of sexual activity. And that was either the primary or one of the expectations of the hook-up, the purpose of the hook-up.
The article was interesting because it was about the emptiness it left people with. The sense of being used and abused by both men and women, guys and girls, and the sense of emptiness it left people with.
And this article was speculating on the damage this will do long term to people who engage in that kind of extremely casual promiscuity.
But how do we cope? How does a single person cope in a culture like ours, I’m suggesting to you similar to the culture of Corinth, when we are relentlessly bombarded with sexual messages, sexual images, sexual lifestyles, we are given sexual expectations? How do we cope with that?
Well if that’s the first aspect, the local issue that Paul is responding to, let me talk now about what I call the personal issue, because Paul now brings his own life and experience to bear on this as well.
In Verse 7,
“I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.”
Everyone of course has their personal situation in life; whether it’s one that is desirable to us or whether it is one that we would love to change, we have our personal situation in life.
Paul was single and he sees the advantages in that in his own life. So he is bold enough to say, “I wish you were all like I am.”
In Matthew 19 Jesus gave several reasons why people remain single. He was talking to the Pharisees who asked him a question about divorce and Jesus’ answer to that gives a very, very high view of marriage.
He said, as in the case of Moses, because of the hardening of people’s hearts, there are situations where marriages break down, where things go wrong and because of the hardness of people’s hearts, one or the other or both, their marriage breaks down.
He acknowledges that. But He is presenting such a high view that when He had stopped discussing with the Pharisees, the disciples in Matthew 19:10 said to Jesus,
“If this is the situation between a husband and a wife, it is better not to marry.”
“Man, this is so tight and so demanding, it’s better not to marry.
And Jesus said,
“Well not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.”
And then in Verse 12 He gave three reasons why people stay single. He says,
“For some are eunuchs…”
Of course a eunuch was literally a castrated male. It was not unknown in the Roman Empire where if a household servant was caring for women he might become a eunuch so that he would have no sexual interest.
We have the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 who worked in the palace of Queen Candace and may be working in close proximity to her, this was part of the price that they paid. We would see it as barbaric today but that is what was true of that day.
But although that was true, I think that in this context it is a euphemism for somebody who remains unmarried.
And He says this,
“Some are eunuchs” (unmarried) “because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven.”
So there are some who were born that way, He says first of all. In other words, what this must mean is that they don’t really have any urgency and desire to marry. Maybe they have a certain self-sufficiency in themselves that doesn’t need somebody else. Maybe their energies are all challenged into some big goal and purpose in their life that doesn’t leave room for marriage. Maybe they have a low sex drive. Maybe they have some disability that prevents marriage. Maybe they are not attracted to the opposite sex. But He says they were born that way.
Lady Gaga has a song “Born This Way”, which is actually about this. It is actually used as an anthem, an anti-bullying anthem, especially the bullying of gay people. But she talks about you were born this way, that’s just exactly who you are.
But there is a sense in which we were all born differently and some of us were born this way, said Jesus.
Second reason: they were made that way by men. Now if He is referring to literal eunuchs, they were physically castrated by men, usually against their will. A slave might be castrated because of a particular task he might be given.
But you know there are some who have been emotionally damaged by other people, they have been psychologically damaged by other people which has left them in a position where they fear close relationships or they are unable to sustain close relationships and they have been damaged.
I think this category includes a variety of damages that might make it difficult for somebody to establish and sustain a close relationship.
And then thirdly there are those, He says, who have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. This is why I say He is not talking about literal physical eunuchs. These are some who have come to a decision or they have come to a conclusion by the way their life has panned out, that they can serve God better as a single person than they can as a married person.
And Paul himself says that was his position. He felt because he was a single man he was completely dispensable because nobody depended on him. He didn’t have a wife and children to look after so he could run risks that he ran. He could be beaten and stoned and spent years in prison and his family back home are not suffering.
I mean, can you imagine if Paul was married and had a family, you know, and he is packing his suitcase one day and his wife says, “How long are you going for this time Paul?”
“Well I think I am going to be gone for five years.”
“Oh, can’t you make it four? You know, the kids will be graduated by the time you get back?”
I mean it wouldn’t work, would it?
Or you imagine his letters home. “Hi Love, I am missing you. I am in prison again. I have been beaten and flogged and stoned and whipped. Oh, and by the way, our boat sank again last week and I had to cling to a plank and I eventually got washed up on an island. When I got there I got bitten by a poisonous snake, but it’s okay. I didn’t die. But it was a bit sore at the time.”
I mean can you imagine Paul’s wife getting that letter and writing back, “Oh Paul, I am so pleased for you fulfilling the will of God.”
And he writes a P.S., “By the way, there is no money to send you. You will have to apply to the famine relief fund again.”
Paul actually said, “I have a right to a wife.” He maintained that right.
1 Corinthians 9:5:
“Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?”
“I have a right but I have willingly and deliberately renounced this,” was Paul’s experience, “for the sake of the kingdom.”
And we can thank God for people who have accepted that call from God. Do you know, some of the mission fields of the world would collapse if you withdrew all the single missionaries and especially the single women?
We honor those who have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven.
I am going to add a fourth reason to the three that Jesus gave. And the fourth reason is that there is not enough of the opposite sex to go around. Do you know there are slightly more males born to females in the world? 105 baby boys are born to 100 baby girls.
Interestingly, women live, on average, seven years longer than men. So at any given time there is about totally equal 50/50 men/women alive on the planet.
Now because men die early – earlier should I say - there are more men born. But that means if 105 boys are born and 100 girls are born and each of those 100 girls marry, 100 of the men – there’s 5 men left over who the only reason they don’t marry is there aren’t enough women to go around.
That’s the population in general.
When you come into the Christian church, the statistic reverses because there are more females who are Christian than there are males.
George Barna, who is a well-established researcher, says that in North America there are about 60 females to every 40 males in the church. That is a significant differential.
I used to go and speak in Sweden quite a lot. I suppose I went to Sweden every year for a week or so for probably about 20 years. And in the church in Sweden there are 2 female Christians to every male Christian, approximately.
I was speaking one day in a context and I said, “There always seems to be a lot more girls than guys in the meetings” and they said, “Well yeah, that’s the way it is in Sweden.”
When a girl becomes a Christian, if she is taking Jesus Christ seriously, one of the issues in her discipleship is that “by being faithful to Jesus Christ, I reduce my possibilities of marriage, if I am going to marry only somebody who belongs to the Lord.”
At the end of the first service this morning a young man came to me and said, “God really spoke to me this morning.”
I said, “Great! What did He say to you?”
“He called me to Sweden.”
So there may be others of you who might like to – we should have a mission trip to Sweden for young men, single young men!
I understand in Russia the ratio is quite similar in the Christian church.
And do you know, most people who are single are not single out of choice, are not single out of a sense of a call, are not single because they cannot sustain relationships; the vast majority are single because they have never actually met somebody that they want to marry.
There is a gentleman I used to know. He’s been in heaven for 20 years now. I knew him for many years. And I remember having a cup of tea with him one day when he was an old man; he was in his 70’s then.
And his name was Mr. VanDoren and that’s how I knew him. And I said to him (he had been single all his life), I said, “Mr. VanDoren, did you ever want to marry?”
And he had a low drawn out voice and he said, “Well, in my case, the desirable were never obtainable and the obtainable were never desirable.”
And that is simply the case for a lot of people. You know, if there was somebody desirable who was available, great, but there just isn’t and there are a few available but they are just not desirable.
Mr. VanDoren did say to me that in his younger days he enjoyed the freedom of his singleness. He spent his life in ministry. But he said, “In my older years I lack the companionship.”
I think we need to be careful of saying “God has called me to be single.” We may be single in the present but be careful, it might change.
I had a friend of mine who in his 30’s began to say publicly he believed God had called him to be single because the work he was doing was such that he felt he could do it best as a single man.
But then he met a girl and fell in love with her and he got married and had to go around saying, “Well, actually I didn’t quite understand the will of God properly.”
I talked to another guy this morning. He said, “When I was young I was in a group of men. We called ourselves “Bachelor till the Rapture”. He said, “Every one of us got married eventually.”
So be careful.
I could never say to God as a young Christian in my 20’s, “I am happy to stay single the rest of my life. If that’s what You want, that’s fine.” I knew that was the ideal to be able to say that to God.
What I did say to God was, “Please don’t let me marry the wrong person and if there isn’t a right person, I don’t want to marry the wrong person.” I can think of nothing worse than being married to the wrong person.
Now a Christian does have a limited field because the Scripture tells us that we are to marry a fellow believer. We are to marry “in the Lord” is Paul’s quote here in this chapter.
2 Corinthians 6:14 says,
“Don’t be yoked together with unbelievers…what fellowship can light have with darkness? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?”
To be yoked is what you did with oxen; you yoked them together. The closest yoking in life is marriage.
And he says don’t be yoked a believer with an unbeliever because you will not be able to share in common the deepest issue of your heart.
Again after the first service this morning (you see, you second service people have the advantage of what people say to me after the first service), he said, “I am here every Sunday on my own because my wife is not a believer. When we married, neither of us were believers.”
He said, “I have come to know Christ.” And he said, “I love my wife dearly and she knows it.” (He’s probably in his 30’s, 40’s maybe). “I love my wife dearly,” he said, “but we cannot share this most important thing in my life. We talk about Christ, we talk about the gospel, but it always leads to arguments and fighting.”
Now Paul says in this passage, by the way, 1 Corinthians 7, if you marry somebody and you become a Christian and they don’t, don’t leave them.
If the unbeliever wants to leave because he is not in fellowship with God or she is not in fellowship with God and they do not like the fact that now Christ is pre-eminent in your life, if they want to leave, let them go, he said, you do no wrong in doing that. But don’t initiate it. Stay with them.
And as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9[7]:39,
“A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.”
Be very careful of what is sometimes called “missionary dating.” Do you know what missionary dating is? It’s dating in order to lead somebody to Christ. It’s “flirting that leads to converting” is the idea, but it doesn’t work. Because it is much easier to pull somebody down than it is to pull somebody else up.
Sam, you’re sitting listening well in the front row. Just come up here a moment, would you? You’re a good lad. I have got a chair over here. I am going to give you a visual aid. Are you okay with heights?
(Yeah.)
Are you sure?
(Yeah)
Would you like to stand on that chair?
(Sure.)
Would you like to hold my hand? Well what I am going to do is not going to work if you don’t. He is my boyfriend or my girlfriend or whatever. He’s a believer and I’m not so his idea is that if he can date me he will bring me to Christ. That’s his idea. And I am not a Christian.
So what I want you to do is to pull me up onto the chair to join you, okay? Can you do that?
It’s a lot easier to pull somebody down than it is to pull somebody…thanks Sam. Are you single?
(Yeah.)
Yeah, that’s good for you.
But he says only marry somebody in the Lord.
There is a couple in this church. He started coming here a few months ago. He was looking for God, looking to find out the meaning and purpose of life and he came here. And after a few weeks he invited his girlfriend to come with him. And she came to Christ fairly quickly. So she is now a Christian and he is not.
She was reading her Bible and came across this verse, “Don’t, as a believer, be yoked together with an unbeliever”, so she said to him, “I have found this verse that says you and I can’t continue together as boyfriend and girlfriend until you become a Christian because I am a Christian and you are not and we would be unequally yoked.”
And he said, “Well, it was me who took you to church in the first place.”
She said, “I know but I have come to know Christ. You haven’t yet.”
So he called me and said, “I am in a dilemma. I have got a problem. My girlfriend wants to break our friendship because she has become a Christian and it’s my fault she became a Christian.”
So he came to see me and we talked about; he told me all that and then we talked about what is the gospel and trying to understand it. He went away and we met again a month later. And God was at work in his heart and so he came to Christ.
And a couple of Sundays later he came down and said, “Oh by the way, this is my fiancée.” So they may be here this morning. And I tried to contact him during the week to find out if he would let me tell his story but I have told it anyway now. (It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission sometimes.)
But God is going to bless that couple for their conscientiousness in doing the right thing.
Now when Paul speaks about singleness as a gift, I don’t think the meaning of that is “this is a privilege” because it may well be a burden. It may well be a cross to bear for some of us.
But the word gift, when he says, “One has this gift, one has that”, the word gift is the Greek word “charisma” which comes from “charis” which means grace and grace is God gifting. It is God equipping, it is God providing.
So the gift is not so much the position of singleness but the provision for singleness. That whether you are married or single you have resources in the Lord Jesus Christ to live as you need to live for today and tomorrow. It will be for today, tomorrow, for this week, for next week, for next month, as each day counts, His grace in that situation.
And I think I said a couple weeks ago that when I used to work mainly with young people I used to encourage them that a good preparation for marriage is learning to live wholly as a single person, to be complete so that you don’t try to find a girl or a guy just to meet your needs, but you have learned before God to be complete in yourself.
And I used to say to them, resist the pressure of a girlfriend or a boyfriend for its own sake.
In the Song of Songs, which is a beautiful love poem right in the middle of the Bible, right in the center of the Bible, and in the Song of Songs, three times it says, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”
Don’t awaken love prematurely. Wait for the right time because God will lead you, God will lead you to the right person at the right time if that is His purpose for you.
I remember again a man saying to me when I was a young man; he said, “Don’t worry about finding a wife. If you are too blind to see her, God will hit you over the head with her so relax.”
And He did.
So Paul says marriage is a gift, there’s divine provision for marriage. And singleness is a gift; there is a divine provision for singleness.
That’s why, by the way, when your marriage is tough, don’t give up. If you can together draw on the grace of God – if one of you does and one of you doesn’t, of course you have a different situation.
Marriage is hard work. Paul says it’s harder to be married than it is to be single.
In Verse 28 of Chapter 7,
“Those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.”
And of course there are many married people who admire the freedoms of a single person, their physical freedom, their financial freedom.
You know it’s costly being married too. Do you know in Canada it costs $243,660 (that’s almost a quarter million dollars) to raise a child to 18? $12,825 a year, $1070.00 per month. And that’s before you send them off to university!
Paul says, “Look I would rather you were free of that trouble.”
Anyway, that’s enough of a discouragement here.
There’s the local issue of the question they had asked him. There is this personal issue. “Well, I’m single and I wish that you were and I have got good reasons why I can say that to you. But if you marry, that’s good as well.”
But the third issue is that over-arching issue. There’s a big issue here that Paul talks about and it’s the most important part of Paul’s argument. And it is this: that if Christ is Lord, your marital status is not the defining issue of your life, nor the central issue of your life.
He says in Verse 26,
“Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for you to remain as you are. Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife.”
And then in Verse 29,
“What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not, etc…For this world in its present form is passing away.”
We don’t know enough about what was going on in Corinth nor what he means when he says, “Because of this present crisis”.
What is this present crisis? What does he mean when he says that time is short? What does he mean when he says “this world in its present form is passing away?”
Well apparently there was an earthquake sometime around that era so this was maybe a crisis created by the earthquake, everybody is panicking, you know, and there’s lots to do.
Maybe he is talking about the second coming of Christ. Maybe he was expecting Christ back imminently.
Perhaps it’s just the urgency of the task of bringing the gospel.
Well all those possibilities are there but I think the principle behind this is that Paul is saying to both married people and single people, keep your eye on the big issues.
This world and this life is not the whole story, he is saying. Your life is not defined by your marital status, whatever it is. And don’t prejudice the bigger purposes of God just for your own personal convenience and wishes.
To quote Jesus, Matthew 6:
“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.”
What are the “these things”? They include clothes, food, the length of your life; it includes your marital status.
Your goal is to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and these things, as God wishes them to be in your life, will be added to you.
I have known people who had a clear sense of direction from God and they began to pursue it but then got swept off their feet by somebody who doesn’t share that same direction. And they lose the priority that they felt was what they had been called to do.
You see Paul is not pampering to the view, “I just want God to give me what I want. I am just waiting for Him to answer my prayers for a wife. I just want God to meet my needs.”
He is not pampering to that. He is saying, think bigger about your life.
“And unmarried man,” he says in Verse 32 “is concerned about the Lord’s affairs – how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided.”
Now he is not saying it is wrong to be concerned about your wife and your family, all that is not in itself part of the Lord’s concern, because it is. But when you have that responsibility, he says, you have got to take it seriously.
And it may reduce some other areas of your life that would be better fulfilled as a single person because “I have a purpose for your life” is God’s word to each of us.
In other words I think we can reduce what Paul is saying to this: he is saying, “I am not actually really concerned whether you are married or single – that’s your business. If you stay single, I think you are doing well. I’d prefer that. If you get married, you are doing well as well; that’s good as well.”
So that isn’t really the issue. I am concerned about the real issue and that is, whether you are married or single, that you live with undivided devotion to the Lord. And that as a married couple together, your first question is “what is the will of God for our lives together?” What are the priorities of God in our lives? How do we live according to His purposes for us?”
And in the context of the licentious city of Corinth and of the equally licentious 21st Century Canada, what he is saying is quit being sex oriented, quit being need oriented and be Christ oriented in your life.
That is the issue that is going to last. Our present circumstances are not our ultimate circumstances. The way we live this present life with the sacrifices we all have to make, is not the determining thing about the next life.
I have a new granddaughter born this week and her name is Hope. It’s a beautiful name. She has spent 9 months in her mother’s womb. Last Tuesday night she left all the security of her mother’s womb and came to live in this big wide noisy world.
She was there for 9 months in her mother’s womb. She may be 90 years in this world, who knows? She may live through to the 22nd Century.
And it is interesting how naturally she will bring her body back into the fetal position, lift her little bottom up, tuck up her knees, how the heartbeat of her mother will comfort her. That’s the world she has known the last months, but she has got to get over the womb and she is going to start to live a different kind of life.
And Paul is saying you are in a world that is temporary, that is passing away and you are living governed by all that seems to be pushed at you in this world. But there is a bigger world to come. Live on earth but with the eternal issues in mind.
The life of a caterpillar is a certain kind of life, but one day it becomes a butterfly. And that’s a totally different life. For a caterpillar life, gravity is a big issue. If you get too close to the end of that leaf you are chomping your way through, you are going to be over the edge and down.
But for a butterfly, gravity is not an issue. You can leap off the leaf and soar into the sky.
And sometimes this caterpillar life that we are living now on earth is a life we get so preoccupied with that we think everything in this life is important. And this life is not long. It is like a mist that appears for a little while, says James, and then disappears.
And there is going to be a day, when as we live for the purposes of God in the state in which He has placed us, that we will look back and see that preparation for the bigger things.
And by the way, marriage is only for this life. Jesus said that in Matthew 22:30,
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will all be like the angels in heaven.”
So, sorry if you are enjoying your marriage. It’s not going to last. Some of you will be very disappointed by that verse; some of you will be very relieved by that verse. You will stick it up on the wall in your home, in your bathroom mirror. “At the resurrection, phew!”
If you are single you are not going to miss out in eternity because you weren’t married. Don’t believe the Mormon nonsense about celestial marriages, will you. Jesus said it’s for this life only.
Paul’s thrust is this: the basis issue is not who is going to be my mate but who is going to be my master? That’s the fundamental issue.
This is the issue that transcends this life into the next. This is the central issue of the New Testament. It is the central issue of Christian discipleship.
Who is going to be my master? And as Christ is my Master, if He gives me a mate, great!
You will have your difficulties – he tells us that – but live it well.
And if you remain single or you become single for whatever reason, thank Him for the gift of His resources to live that way.
If you are married here this morning, look after your wife, look after your husband, look after your family, together under the lordship of Christ. Open your home to single people, embrace them, include them, make your life and your family count. Serve God together. That’s the privilege of marriage and family.
If you are single, live your life also under the lordship of Christ and take every opportunity He gives you to develop good relationships, good friendships and trust Him with the agenda of your life.
We sang this morning – and we sang it well – I hope we sang it from our hearts and from our understanding,
I lay me down.
I am not my own
I belong to You alone
Lay me down, lay me down.
With this heart open wide
From the depths and from the heights
I will bring a sacrifice
I lay me down, I am not my own.
Letting go of all my pride
Giving up all my rights
Take this life and let it shine
Take this life and let it shine
It will be my joy to say
Your will, Your way
Lay me down, lay me down
There is no life apart from You
Lay me down, I lay me down.
Some of us need to lay our marriages down. Some of us need to lay our singleness down and say, “Lord Jesus, this status in which I find myself, I give to You. With this heart open wide, I bring this sacrifice. You be Lord in this area of my life.”
Let us pray together. Lord Jesus, we come to You in humility this morning. I pray for those here who are single that they might recognize the provision that they have in the presence of the Lord Jesus in their hearts.
We know it is so often not easy. There may be times of loneliness, nobody to immediately share things with, coming home to an empty apartment. I pray, Lord Jesus, that Your presence in their lives, Your work in their lives, will be so deep and so rich and so full that out of that strength they may form beautiful friendships. Because we know that it is Your intention that we share our lives humanly with one another.
Pray for those who are married. Pray for those who are going through difficult times. Help us Lord to bring and lay our marriages down and our individual lives down before You and find Your grace in a new way to not only meet the needs of our own lives but which flows out in blessing to other people.
Part 4. Singleness: The Gift Few Peoples Want
Singleness, the Gift Few People Want
Pastor Charles Price
If you have got your Bible this morning I am going to read from 1 Corinthians and Chapter 7 - 1 Corinthians Chapter 7. In many ways I would like to read the whole chapter. I am not going to; I am going to read the opening couple of verses and then the last section, though what I have to share with you really comes out of the whole of this chapter.
But in 1 Corinthians Chapter 7 and Verse 1 Paul writes,
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.
“But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.”
Then down to Verse 25:
“Now about virgins…”
(And that word there is used of single people.)
“Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgement as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
“Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for you to remain as you are.
“Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife.
“But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.
“What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.
“I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs – how he can please the Lord.
“But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs; her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world – how she can please her husband.
“I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
“If anyone thinks he is acting improperly toward the virgin he is engaged to, and if she is getting along in years and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married.
“But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin – this man also does the right thing.
“So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does even better.
“A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.
“In my judgement, she is happier if she stays as she is – and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Phew! That’s a very interesting passage.
We have been talking for several weeks about gender and sexuality and I wanted this morning to talk about singleness. And I am calling it “Singleness, the Gift Few People Want”.
I talk about it as a gift because in 1 Corinthians 7:4 [7] (a verse that we didn’t read just now), Paul says,
“I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that gift.”
The “this gift” is the gift of singleness and the “that gift” is the gift of marriage.
We don’t often welcome singleness as a gift. Especially in our younger days we probably fear it more as a fate.
But Paul speaks here about it being a gift. We will come in a few moments to try and understand what he means by that.
Now I am fully aware of the incongruity of somebody who has been married 30 years talking about singleness and its virtues and its struggles. I appreciate that dilemma.
But to some extent all of us can relate to being single because everybody is single at some stage in their lives.
Prior to marriage, of course, we are all single.
I didn’t marry until I was 30 and so I had my whole decade of the 20’s as a single person. I know and recall and remember some of the issues related to that.
Some experience the death of a spouse and there is always one that is left, and they are left to live singly, sometimes for many years – they may or may not remarry. But they may have – and many of you here this morning are living a single life for that reason.
Others go through separation or divorce and you find yourself where you are having to cope again with a single life.
And there are of course some of us who never marry at all.
Statistics Canada tells us that in the last census 51.5% of the adult population of Canada are single. That is the first time since census began in 1871 that there are more single adults in Canada than there are married adults.
And this is not an aberration; this is a trend that has been slowly moving in that direction.
The previous census 49 point something; now it’s over 50%.
And there are different ways that we view singleness, either consciously we have formulated our thoughts about it, or subconsciously we have a certain attitude towards single people.
We may see marriage and singleness as parallel states, each with their particular joys and particular sorrows with their particular benefits and their individual troubles.
Some of us may see singleness not as parallel to marriage but as a second best, that someone who is single is living a deficient life because they have not come into marriage.
I didn’t meet my wife Hilary until I was 28. I had already been four years in full time Christian ministry, a lot of it travelling around speaking at churches and conferences.
And I have to tell you, I got absolutely tired to death of people implying that I needed to settle down and find a wife. I actually got sick of it. Because again and again and again and again people would make statements or ask me questions all of which implied that you need to settle down with a wife because to not do so will somehow be a second best position for you.
And I am sure there are folks here who are single and you too are equally sick to death of that kind of implication, and especially when it comes from fellow Christians.
The third view we may have of singleness is that it is something special, that it is a privilege, that there is a vocation attached to a single life.
Now we of course are an evangelical church, an independent evangelical church. We don’t belong to any great movement but there are religious orders who view singleness and celibacy as a particular calling by God and they embrace it as a privilege. Although there are struggles related to that, they embrace it as a calling from God.
My question today is what does Scripture have to say to the 51.5% of our population who are single? And in particular, in this chapter in 1 Corinthians 7 when Paul is addressing the church in Corinth, what does Scripture have to say to Christian singles? Because it is different to what you might say to the world at large.
Now there are two passages in the New Testament that speak specifically about the single state. One is Jesus in Matthew 19 – I am going to refer to that in a few minutes’ time. And the other is Paul here in 1 Corinthians 7.
Jesus, of course, is the central figure of the whole Bible. He was single.
Paul was the most prolific writer of the New Testament. He was single.
And based on this passage in 1 Corinthians 7 I want to look under three headings really that show a progression from a question that was being asked of Paul through to talking about his own personal issue (and he brings in his own life experience here) to a big issue, a big principle by which all of our lives are to be lived, but which has its very particular bearing on the single life.
So let me start then with the local issue because when Paul writes he is responding to a question that is being raised by the Christians in Corinth. Because in Verse 1 of Chapter 7 he says,
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to marry.”
Now the problem is we don’t know what they had written about. We have two of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians; we have none of the Corinthians’ letters to Paul.
But they had written him a letter in which they had raised a number of questions because he picks this up several times in responding to what they had asked him.
And the answer to one of the questions they had raised with him was, “It is good for a man not to marry” (as my version of the NIV puts it). Though actually the word marry is not in the original text.
Literally it says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” That’s how many of the translations accurately translate it. But touching a woman is clearly a euphemism for sexual intimacy.
The ESV says, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” And then he qualifies it by saying, “But it is good to marry. That’s good as well. But if you are not married, it is not good to have sexual relations with a woman.”
It is therefore very unlikely that the Corinthians had written to Paul and said, “Paul is it okay for a Christian to remain single?” And his answer is, “Absolutely it is okay for a Christian to remain single, in fact it is good to remain single.”
It is highly unlikely that that was the question because Paul himself was single and they knew that. They knew he would affirm that position.
So let me try to reconstruct the question, if you like, that they had asked him.
Corinth was a port city in Greece and it was a city noted for its sexual permissiveness and sexual immorality. The term “a Corinthian woman” was a preverbal phrase for a sexually loose woman. “Oh, she’s a Corinthian woman.”
I have on my desk at home the Oxford English Dictionary and it gives a definition to the word “Corinthianize” and it says, “to Corinthianize is to live licentiously, that is, without morals.”
Corinth was a sexually lax, permissive, hedonistic society and a 21st Century English dictionary still gives that definition of the word Corinthianize because for 20 centuries it has been associated with this lax, licentious, permissive, sexually hedonistic life.
Paul acknowledges this culture in Corinth because in Verse 2 he says,
“Since there is so much immorality…”
And then he says that’s why it’s good for a man to marry.
In Chapter 6 and Verse 9 he talks about the sexually immoral adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexual offenders. And then he says in Verse 11:
“And this is what some of you were.”
“You people sitting in this church, this was your history; this was your lifestyle.” Because this is the culture of Corinth and out in the Corinthian community to be sexually immoral, an adulterer, a prostitute whether male or female or a homosexual offender; that’s exactly the lifestyle that is prevalent in Corinth.
“But,” he went on to say, “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
So this lax morality represented normality and the status quo. It’s what everybody did.
And in light of this, I think a likely question being asked was something like this: In the prevailing culture of sexual freedoms, is it unreasonable to ask Christians to refrain from sexual activity outside of marriage or is it okay for them to have some measure of sexual experience outside of marriage?
I suggest that is likely the spirit of the question that Paul is responding to. And that is a very relevant question to our society today.
I received an e-mail this week in the light of what I have said in the last couple of Sundays. I received an e-mail that said this:
“In the light of our changing world and the availability of contraception, are the circumstances not different now to the New Testament day and why is it not legitimate to engage in a responsible sexual relationship before marriage?”
Now I had that question this week. I suggest the question Paul had received was in that kind of vein.
And here is his answer.
“Now for the matters you wrote about: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. But since there is so much immorality each man should have his own wife, and each wife her own husband.”
That is the context, says Paul, for the sexual relationship as God has ordained it.
Now this is a very real question because sexual morals have changed so much in recent decades. The casual relationships in our culture are fairly normalized.
The Globe and Mail in April carried an article on the hook-up culture of single young people. To hook up is to engage in casual relationships that involve some form of sexual activity.
And in a survey of college students that this article is actually based on in the Globe and Mail, a survey of college students across Canada, 80% of students had engaged in a hook-up relationship at least once.
Now it didn’t mean it involved sexual intercourse necessarily but it involved some measure of sexual activity. And that was either the primary or one of the expectations of the hook-up, the purpose of the hook-up.
The article was interesting because it was about the emptiness it left people with. The sense of being used and abused by both men and women, guys and girls, and the sense of emptiness it left people with.
And this article was speculating on the damage this will do long term to people who engage in that kind of extremely casual promiscuity.
But how do we cope? How does a single person cope in a culture like ours, I’m suggesting to you similar to the culture of Corinth, when we are relentlessly bombarded with sexual messages, sexual images, sexual lifestyles, we are given sexual expectations? How do we cope with that?
Well if that’s the first aspect, the local issue that Paul is responding to, let me talk now about what I call the personal issue, because Paul now brings his own life and experience to bear on this as well.
In Verse 7,
“I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.”
Everyone of course has their personal situation in life; whether it’s one that is desirable to us or whether it is one that we would love to change, we have our personal situation in life.
Paul was single and he sees the advantages in that in his own life. So he is bold enough to say, “I wish you were all like I am.”
In Matthew 19 Jesus gave several reasons why people remain single. He was talking to the Pharisees who asked him a question about divorce and Jesus’ answer to that gives a very, very high view of marriage.
He said, as in the case of Moses, because of the hardening of people’s hearts, there are situations where marriages break down, where things go wrong and because of the hardness of people’s hearts, one or the other or both, their marriage breaks down.
He acknowledges that. But He is presenting such a high view that when He had stopped discussing with the Pharisees, the disciples in Matthew 19:10 said to Jesus,
“If this is the situation between a husband and a wife, it is better not to marry.”
“Man, this is so tight and so demanding, it’s better not to marry.
And Jesus said,
“Well not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given.”
And then in Verse 12 He gave three reasons why people stay single. He says,
“For some are eunuchs…”
Of course a eunuch was literally a castrated male. It was not unknown in the Roman Empire where if a household servant was caring for women he might become a eunuch so that he would have no sexual interest.
We have the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 who worked in the palace of Queen Candace and may be working in close proximity to her, this was part of the price that they paid. We would see it as barbaric today but that is what was true of that day.
But although that was true, I think that in this context it is a euphemism for somebody who remains unmarried.
And He says this,
“Some are eunuchs” (unmarried) “because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven.”
So there are some who were born that way, He says first of all. In other words, what this must mean is that they don’t really have any urgency and desire to marry. Maybe they have a certain self-sufficiency in themselves that doesn’t need somebody else. Maybe their energies are all challenged into some big goal and purpose in their life that doesn’t leave room for marriage. Maybe they have a low sex drive. Maybe they have some disability that prevents marriage. Maybe they are not attracted to the opposite sex. But He says they were born that way.
Lady Gaga has a song “Born This Way”, which is actually about this. It is actually used as an anthem, an anti-bullying anthem, especially the bullying of gay people. But she talks about you were born this way, that’s just exactly who you are.
But there is a sense in which we were all born differently and some of us were born this way, said Jesus.
Second reason: they were made that way by men. Now if He is referring to literal eunuchs, they were physically castrated by men, usually against their will. A slave might be castrated because of a particular task he might be given.
But you know there are some who have been emotionally damaged by other people, they have been psychologically damaged by other people which has left them in a position where they fear close relationships or they are unable to sustain close relationships and they have been damaged.
I think this category includes a variety of damages that might make it difficult for somebody to establish and sustain a close relationship.
And then thirdly there are those, He says, who have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. This is why I say He is not talking about literal physical eunuchs. These are some who have come to a decision or they have come to a conclusion by the way their life has panned out, that they can serve God better as a single person than they can as a married person.
And Paul himself says that was his position. He felt because he was a single man he was completely dispensable because nobody depended on him. He didn’t have a wife and children to look after so he could run risks that he ran. He could be beaten and stoned and spent years in prison and his family back home are not suffering.
I mean, can you imagine if Paul was married and had a family, you know, and he is packing his suitcase one day and his wife says, “How long are you going for this time Paul?”
“Well I think I am going to be gone for five years.”
“Oh, can’t you make it four? You know, the kids will be graduated by the time you get back?”
I mean it wouldn’t work, would it?
Or you imagine his letters home. “Hi Love, I am missing you. I am in prison again. I have been beaten and flogged and stoned and whipped. Oh, and by the way, our boat sank again last week and I had to cling to a plank and I eventually got washed up on an island. When I got there I got bitten by a poisonous snake, but it’s okay. I didn’t die. But it was a bit sore at the time.”
I mean can you imagine Paul’s wife getting that letter and writing back, “Oh Paul, I am so pleased for you fulfilling the will of God.”
And he writes a P.S., “By the way, there is no money to send you. You will have to apply to the famine relief fund again.”
Paul actually said, “I have a right to a wife.” He maintained that right.
1 Corinthians 9:5:
“Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?”
“I have a right but I have willingly and deliberately renounced this,” was Paul’s experience, “for the sake of the kingdom.”
And we can thank God for people who have accepted that call from God. Do you know, some of the mission fields of the world would collapse if you withdrew all the single missionaries and especially the single women?
We honor those who have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven.
I am going to add a fourth reason to the three that Jesus gave. And the fourth reason is that there is not enough of the opposite sex to go around. Do you know there are slightly more males born to females in the world? 105 baby boys are born to 100 baby girls.
Interestingly, women live, on average, seven years longer than men. So at any given time there is about totally equal 50/50 men/women alive on the planet.
Now because men die early – earlier should I say - there are more men born. But that means if 105 boys are born and 100 girls are born and each of those 100 girls marry, 100 of the men – there’s 5 men left over who the only reason they don’t marry is there aren’t enough women to go around.
That’s the population in general.
When you come into the Christian church, the statistic reverses because there are more females who are Christian than there are males.
George Barna, who is a well-established researcher, says that in North America there are about 60 females to every 40 males in the church. That is a significant differential.
I used to go and speak in Sweden quite a lot. I suppose I went to Sweden every year for a week or so for probably about 20 years. And in the church in Sweden there are 2 female Christians to every male Christian, approximately.
I was speaking one day in a context and I said, “There always seems to be a lot more girls than guys in the meetings” and they said, “Well yeah, that’s the way it is in Sweden.”
When a girl becomes a Christian, if she is taking Jesus Christ seriously, one of the issues in her discipleship is that “by being faithful to Jesus Christ, I reduce my possibilities of marriage, if I am going to marry only somebody who belongs to the Lord.”
At the end of the first service this morning a young man came to me and said, “God really spoke to me this morning.”
I said, “Great! What did He say to you?”
“He called me to Sweden.”
So there may be others of you who might like to – we should have a mission trip to Sweden for young men, single young men!
I understand in Russia the ratio is quite similar in the Christian church.
And do you know, most people who are single are not single out of choice, are not single out of a sense of a call, are not single because they cannot sustain relationships; the vast majority are single because they have never actually met somebody that they want to marry.
There is a gentleman I used to know. He’s been in heaven for 20 years now. I knew him for many years. And I remember having a cup of tea with him one day when he was an old man; he was in his 70’s then.
And his name was Mr. VanDoren and that’s how I knew him. And I said to him (he had been single all his life), I said, “Mr. VanDoren, did you ever want to marry?”
And he had a low drawn out voice and he said, “Well, in my case, the desirable were never obtainable and the obtainable were never desirable.”
And that is simply the case for a lot of people. You know, if there was somebody desirable who was available, great, but there just isn’t and there are a few available but they are just not desirable.
Mr. VanDoren did say to me that in his younger days he enjoyed the freedom of his singleness. He spent his life in ministry. But he said, “In my older years I lack the companionship.”
I think we need to be careful of saying “God has called me to be single.” We may be single in the present but be careful, it might change.
I had a friend of mine who in his 30’s began to say publicly he believed God had called him to be single because the work he was doing was such that he felt he could do it best as a single man.
But then he met a girl and fell in love with her and he got married and had to go around saying, “Well, actually I didn’t quite understand the will of God properly.”
I talked to another guy this morning. He said, “When I was young I was in a group of men. We called ourselves “Bachelor till the Rapture”. He said, “Every one of us got married eventually.”
So be careful.
I could never say to God as a young Christian in my 20’s, “I am happy to stay single the rest of my life. If that’s what You want, that’s fine.” I knew that was the ideal to be able to say that to God.
What I did say to God was, “Please don’t let me marry the wrong person and if there isn’t a right person, I don’t want to marry the wrong person.” I can think of nothing worse than being married to the wrong person.
Now a Christian does have a limited field because the Scripture tells us that we are to marry a fellow believer. We are to marry “in the Lord” is Paul’s quote here in this chapter.
2 Corinthians 6:14 says,
“Don’t be yoked together with unbelievers…what fellowship can light have with darkness? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?”
To be yoked is what you did with oxen; you yoked them together. The closest yoking in life is marriage.
And he says don’t be yoked a believer with an unbeliever because you will not be able to share in common the deepest issue of your heart.
Again after the first service this morning (you see, you second service people have the advantage of what people say to me after the first service), he said, “I am here every Sunday on my own because my wife is not a believer. When we married, neither of us were believers.”
He said, “I have come to know Christ.” And he said, “I love my wife dearly and she knows it.” (He’s probably in his 30’s, 40’s maybe). “I love my wife dearly,” he said, “but we cannot share this most important thing in my life. We talk about Christ, we talk about the gospel, but it always leads to arguments and fighting.”
Now Paul says in this passage, by the way, 1 Corinthians 7, if you marry somebody and you become a Christian and they don’t, don’t leave them.
If the unbeliever wants to leave because he is not in fellowship with God or she is not in fellowship with God and they do not like the fact that now Christ is pre-eminent in your life, if they want to leave, let them go, he said, you do no wrong in doing that. But don’t initiate it. Stay with them.
And as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 9[7]:39,
“A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.”
Be very careful of what is sometimes called “missionary dating.” Do you know what missionary dating is? It’s dating in order to lead somebody to Christ. It’s “flirting that leads to converting” is the idea, but it doesn’t work. Because it is much easier to pull somebody down than it is to pull somebody else up.
Sam, you’re sitting listening well in the front row. Just come up here a moment, would you? You’re a good lad. I have got a chair over here. I am going to give you a visual aid. Are you okay with heights?
(Yeah.)
Are you sure?
(Yeah)
Would you like to stand on that chair?
(Sure.)
Would you like to hold my hand? Well what I am going to do is not going to work if you don’t. He is my boyfriend or my girlfriend or whatever. He’s a believer and I’m not so his idea is that if he can date me he will bring me to Christ. That’s his idea. And I am not a Christian.
So what I want you to do is to pull me up onto the chair to join you, okay? Can you do that?
It’s a lot easier to pull somebody down than it is to pull somebody…thanks Sam. Are you single?
(Yeah.)
Yeah, that’s good for you.
But he says only marry somebody in the Lord.
There is a couple in this church. He started coming here a few months ago. He was looking for God, looking to find out the meaning and purpose of life and he came here. And after a few weeks he invited his girlfriend to come with him. And she came to Christ fairly quickly. So she is now a Christian and he is not.
She was reading her Bible and came across this verse, “Don’t, as a believer, be yoked together with an unbeliever”, so she said to him, “I have found this verse that says you and I can’t continue together as boyfriend and girlfriend until you become a Christian because I am a Christian and you are not and we would be unequally yoked.”
And he said, “Well, it was me who took you to church in the first place.”
She said, “I know but I have come to know Christ. You haven’t yet.”
So he called me and said, “I am in a dilemma. I have got a problem. My girlfriend wants to break our friendship because she has become a Christian and it’s my fault she became a Christian.”
So he came to see me and we talked about; he told me all that and then we talked about what is the gospel and trying to understand it. He went away and we met again a month later. And God was at work in his heart and so he came to Christ.
And a couple of Sundays later he came down and said, “Oh by the way, this is my fiancée.” So they may be here this morning. And I tried to contact him during the week to find out if he would let me tell his story but I have told it anyway now. (It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission sometimes.)
But God is going to bless that couple for their conscientiousness in doing the right thing.
Now when Paul speaks about singleness as a gift, I don’t think the meaning of that is “this is a privilege” because it may well be a burden. It may well be a cross to bear for some of us.
But the word gift, when he says, “One has this gift, one has that”, the word gift is the Greek word “charisma” which comes from “charis” which means grace and grace is God gifting. It is God equipping, it is God providing.
So the gift is not so much the position of singleness but the provision for singleness. That whether you are married or single you have resources in the Lord Jesus Christ to live as you need to live for today and tomorrow. It will be for today, tomorrow, for this week, for next week, for next month, as each day counts, His grace in that situation.
And I think I said a couple weeks ago that when I used to work mainly with young people I used to encourage them that a good preparation for marriage is learning to live wholly as a single person, to be complete so that you don’t try to find a girl or a guy just to meet your needs, but you have learned before God to be complete in yourself.
And I used to say to them, resist the pressure of a girlfriend or a boyfriend for its own sake.
In the Song of Songs, which is a beautiful love poem right in the middle of the Bible, right in the center of the Bible, and in the Song of Songs, three times it says, “Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.”
Don’t awaken love prematurely. Wait for the right time because God will lead you, God will lead you to the right person at the right time if that is His purpose for you.
I remember again a man saying to me when I was a young man; he said, “Don’t worry about finding a wife. If you are too blind to see her, God will hit you over the head with her so relax.”
And He did.
So Paul says marriage is a gift, there’s divine provision for marriage. And singleness is a gift; there is a divine provision for singleness.
That’s why, by the way, when your marriage is tough, don’t give up. If you can together draw on the grace of God – if one of you does and one of you doesn’t, of course you have a different situation.
Marriage is hard work. Paul says it’s harder to be married than it is to be single.
In Verse 28 of Chapter 7,
“Those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.”
And of course there are many married people who admire the freedoms of a single person, their physical freedom, their financial freedom.
You know it’s costly being married too. Do you know in Canada it costs $243,660 (that’s almost a quarter million dollars) to raise a child to 18? $12,825 a year, $1070.00 per month. And that’s before you send them off to university!
Paul says, “Look I would rather you were free of that trouble.”
Anyway, that’s enough of a discouragement here.
There’s the local issue of the question they had asked him. There is this personal issue. “Well, I’m single and I wish that you were and I have got good reasons why I can say that to you. But if you marry, that’s good as well.”
But the third issue is that over-arching issue. There’s a big issue here that Paul talks about and it’s the most important part of Paul’s argument. And it is this: that if Christ is Lord, your marital status is not the defining issue of your life, nor the central issue of your life.
He says in Verse 26,
“Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for you to remain as you are. Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife.”
And then in Verse 29,
“What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not, etc…For this world in its present form is passing away.”
We don’t know enough about what was going on in Corinth nor what he means when he says, “Because of this present crisis”.
What is this present crisis? What does he mean when he says that time is short? What does he mean when he says “this world in its present form is passing away?”
Well apparently there was an earthquake sometime around that era so this was maybe a crisis created by the earthquake, everybody is panicking, you know, and there’s lots to do.
Maybe he is talking about the second coming of Christ. Maybe he was expecting Christ back imminently.
Perhaps it’s just the urgency of the task of bringing the gospel.
Well all those possibilities are there but I think the principle behind this is that Paul is saying to both married people and single people, keep your eye on the big issues.
This world and this life is not the whole story, he is saying. Your life is not defined by your marital status, whatever it is. And don’t prejudice the bigger purposes of God just for your own personal convenience and wishes.
To quote Jesus, Matthew 6:
“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.”
What are the “these things”? They include clothes, food, the length of your life; it includes your marital status.
Your goal is to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and these things, as God wishes them to be in your life, will be added to you.
I have known people who had a clear sense of direction from God and they began to pursue it but then got swept off their feet by somebody who doesn’t share that same direction. And they lose the priority that they felt was what they had been called to do.
You see Paul is not pampering to the view, “I just want God to give me what I want. I am just waiting for Him to answer my prayers for a wife. I just want God to meet my needs.”
He is not pampering to that. He is saying, think bigger about your life.
“And unmarried man,” he says in Verse 32 “is concerned about the Lord’s affairs – how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world – how he can please his wife – and his interests are divided.”
Now he is not saying it is wrong to be concerned about your wife and your family, all that is not in itself part of the Lord’s concern, because it is. But when you have that responsibility, he says, you have got to take it seriously.
And it may reduce some other areas of your life that would be better fulfilled as a single person because “I have a purpose for your life” is God’s word to each of us.
In other words I think we can reduce what Paul is saying to this: he is saying, “I am not actually really concerned whether you are married or single – that’s your business. If you stay single, I think you are doing well. I’d prefer that. If you get married, you are doing well as well; that’s good as well.”
So that isn’t really the issue. I am concerned about the real issue and that is, whether you are married or single, that you live with undivided devotion to the Lord. And that as a married couple together, your first question is “what is the will of God for our lives together?” What are the priorities of God in our lives? How do we live according to His purposes for us?”
And in the context of the licentious city of Corinth and of the equally licentious 21st Century Canada, what he is saying is quit being sex oriented, quit being need oriented and be Christ oriented in your life.
That is the issue that is going to last. Our present circumstances are not our ultimate circumstances. The way we live this present life with the sacrifices we all have to make, is not the determining thing about the next life.
I have a new granddaughter born this week and her name is Hope. It’s a beautiful name. She has spent 9 months in her mother’s womb. Last Tuesday night she left all the security of her mother’s womb and came to live in this big wide noisy world.
She was there for 9 months in her mother’s womb. She may be 90 years in this world, who knows? She may live through to the 22nd Century.
And it is interesting how naturally she will bring her body back into the fetal position, lift her little bottom up, tuck up her knees, how the heartbeat of her mother will comfort her. That’s the world she has known the last months, but she has got to get over the womb and she is going to start to live a different kind of life.
And Paul is saying you are in a world that is temporary, that is passing away and you are living governed by all that seems to be pushed at you in this world. But there is a bigger world to come. Live on earth but with the eternal issues in mind.
The life of a caterpillar is a certain kind of life, but one day it becomes a butterfly. And that’s a totally different life. For a caterpillar life, gravity is a big issue. If you get too close to the end of that leaf you are chomping your way through, you are going to be over the edge and down.
But for a butterfly, gravity is not an issue. You can leap off the leaf and soar into the sky.
And sometimes this caterpillar life that we are living now on earth is a life we get so preoccupied with that we think everything in this life is important. And this life is not long. It is like a mist that appears for a little while, says James, and then disappears.
And there is going to be a day, when as we live for the purposes of God in the state in which He has placed us, that we will look back and see that preparation for the bigger things.
And by the way, marriage is only for this life. Jesus said that in Matthew 22:30,
“At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will all be like the angels in heaven.”
So, sorry if you are enjoying your marriage. It’s not going to last. Some of you will be very disappointed by that verse; some of you will be very relieved by that verse. You will stick it up on the wall in your home, in your bathroom mirror. “At the resurrection, phew!”
If you are single you are not going to miss out in eternity because you weren’t married. Don’t believe the Mormon nonsense about celestial marriages, will you. Jesus said it’s for this life only.
Paul’s thrust is this: the basis issue is not who is going to be my mate but who is going to be my master? That’s the fundamental issue.
This is the issue that transcends this life into the next. This is the central issue of the New Testament. It is the central issue of Christian discipleship.
Who is going to be my master? And as Christ is my Master, if He gives me a mate, great!
You will have your difficulties – he tells us that – but live it well.
And if you remain single or you become single for whatever reason, thank Him for the gift of His resources to live that way.
If you are married here this morning, look after your wife, look after your husband, look after your family, together under the lordship of Christ. Open your home to single people, embrace them, include them, make your life and your family count. Serve God together. That’s the privilege of marriage and family.
If you are single, live your life also under the lordship of Christ and take every opportunity He gives you to develop good relationships, good friendships and trust Him with the agenda of your life.
We sang this morning – and we sang it well – I hope we sang it from our hearts and from our understanding,
I lay me down.
I am not my own
I belong to You alone
Lay me down, lay me down.
With this heart open wide
From the depths and from the heights
I will bring a sacrifice
I lay me down, I am not my own.
Letting go of all my pride
Giving up all my rights
Take this life and let it shine
Take this life and let it shine
It will be my joy to say
Your will, Your way
Lay me down, lay me down
There is no life apart from You
Lay me down, I lay me down.
Some of us need to lay our marriages down. Some of us need to lay our singleness down and say, “Lord Jesus, this status in which I find myself, I give to You. With this heart open wide, I bring this sacrifice. You be Lord in this area of my life.”
Let us pray together. Lord Jesus, we come to You in humility this morning. I pray for those here who are single that they might recognize the provision that they have in the presence of the Lord Jesus in their hearts.
We know it is so often not easy. There may be times of loneliness, nobody to immediately share things with, coming home to an empty apartment. I pray, Lord Jesus, that Your presence in their lives, Your work in their lives, will be so deep and so rich and so full that out of that strength they may form beautiful friendships. Because we know that it is Your intention that we share our lives humanly with one another.
Pray for those who are married. Pray for those who are going through difficult times. Help us Lord to bring and lay our marriages down and our individual lives down before You and find Your grace in a new way to not only meet the needs of our own lives but which flows out in blessing to other people.