7 Myths about Singleness

by Sam Allberry

We know this—Jesus himself lived as a celibate man. So did Paul. Many others have done so as well.

Intimacy and sex, while often overlapping, are not identical, nor are they always concurrent.

Ed Shaw asks, “Why is it not possible that he enjoyed the non-sexual intimacy of his friendship with Jonathan (also a married man) more than the sexual intimacy of his relationships with Abigail, Ahinoam and Michal?”

David’s words about the deep intimacy he enjoyed with Jonathan indicate not that it must have been sexual, but that the sexual relationships he had with the women in his life might have lacked real intimacy.

We see the same dynamic today. Hookup culture means that it can be very easy to have sex with someone you’ve only just met and barely know. It is a huge error to mistake this for true intimacy.

Sexual union is designed to express and deepen intimacy within marriage. It cannot, in and of its...

sex may be a form of physical intimacy, but only that. It will not provide the deeper intimacy we need in life. It is possible to have lots of sex and no real intimacy.

It is possible to have a lot of intimacy in life and for none of it to be sexual. Sexual and romantic relationships are not the only ones of genuine, life-giving closeness.

We need to rediscover a biblical category of intimacy that has been neglected in our cultural context and sadly even i...

Think about it. In recent years “friend” has gone from being a noun to a verb, and a verb that describes something pretty mundane.

We friend someone when we add them to our list of contacts on social media. To give someone access to our profile page is to make them a friend. Hardly surprising that for many of us today, a friend is little more than an acquaintance, someone we nominally stay in touch with and might meet up with from time to time.

But this is a massive downgrading of what friendship has meant to earlier generations, and what it continues to mean i...

He concluded, “Few value it because few experience it.”

The sad reality is that there is now an appalling paucity of friendship in many of our churches.

For our Western culture, and, sadly, for much of our church culture as well, friendship is largely dispensable.

When it comes to intimacy, our focus is on the romantic and the marital. But this is all a far cry from what the Bible has in ...

Actually, this is the exact category of people we tend to mean when we talk about friendship today—people we hang around with a fair bit but are not necessarily people we would open the deep things of our heart to. These are people who tend to come and go.

But the danger is that this creates the illusion of true friendship without the actual reality of it.

The average person has 237 Facebook friends, but what we have 237 of is far from what Proverbs would describe as “friends.”

You may have lots of people around who sort of know what you’re up to, but that is a far cry from the soul-to-soul, spill-the-beans kind of frie...

A friend is someone who has chosen you.

C. S. Lewis once put it, friendship is “the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. . . . The species, biologically considered, has no need of it.”

It’s saying friends are there for you at all times in a way that isn’t necessarily the case with a biological brother.

The sign of a real friend is that they’re there for you in all seasons. That means they’re there for you when you’re at rock bottom:

The real friend doesn’t see you as a means to an end, so they stick around. They don’t just celebrate with you in your successes; they’re there for you in your failures. Real friendship isn’t fickle.

Real friendship also isn’t superficial. A friend is not merely someone who knows your Facebook page. A friend is someone who knows your soul:

There is nothing like having a close friend, one of the people on earth who most knows and loves you, give you earnest direction in life.

it is a gift to have someone who knows your soul, knows the best and worst about you, yet through it all is deeply committed to you.

But this doesn’t happen without openness and vulnerability, which is one of the hallmarks of biblical friendship.

A friend is someone you tell your secrets to, someone you let in on the real things that are going on in your life. They’re the ones who really know what’s going on with you. They know your temptations, and they know what most delights your heart. They know how to pray for you instinctively.

So as Tim Keller has said, we become our own public-relations managers. We cultivate the sort of image we want the world to have of us.

There’s something vulnerable about being deeply known. So when we do find people we can share our inner selves with, it is a huge relief and a great gift.

Yes, he is the leader and his disciples are to follow him. But we will miss something vital if we leave it just like that.

He is our master, our Lord; but he is not just that to us.

All that he has to share with us from the Father, he has shared. He’s not holding back vital things from us.

As far as he’s concerned, what he knows, we now know. He has let us in entirely. It is beautiful. He is the friend par excellence.

The friend is the person who knows you at your sparkling best and shameful worst and yet still loves you. To be so deeply known and so deeply loved is precious.

Proverbs commends friendship not because it is a nice bonus in life, but because it is key to l...

There’s a closeness, an intimacy, to friendship without which we become vulnerable to ruin.

Proverbs has so much to say about friendship, precisely because it is a key component of wisdom.

But the fact is, all of us need friends—married people every bit as much as singles.

When we find we’re able to cultivate these Proverbs-type friendships, we find it’s possible to enjoy a huge amount of intimacy in life.

the Bible speaks of friendship as a wonderfully intimate way of relating to others.

Jesus reconfigures how we are to think about family. His real family is defined along spiritual rather than biological lines. We become part of his family when we follow the will of God. It is our spiritual orientation rather than our physical birth that now becomes ultimately defining.

It means, if we’re Christians, that if we have the privilege of belonging to a physical family, we mustn’t think it is our only family. And

I love this about Jesus: he never buries things in the small print. Jesus is front and center about the cost of following him.

Discipleship is costly. Sometimes it’s really costly.

Even those who leave whole family networks behind for the sake of Jesus will receive back from him vastly more—a hundredfold.

Jesus promises us family—“houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands.”1 (And, yes, a side order of persecutions too, whether we ordered it or not. That just comes as part of the bundle.)

It is an extraordinary promise. Whatever relational cost our discipleship may incur, however much family we may lose in the course of following Christ, Jesus is saying that even in this life it will be worth it. Following him means an abundance of spiritual family. Nature may have given us only one mother and one father; the gospel gives us far more.