7 Myths about Singleness

by Sam Allberry

When God draws people to himself, he draws them to one another as well. The people of Jesus Christ are to be family.

But immediate family implies a much tighter connection. We are to be there for one another and lean on one another. We have a stake in one another. What happens to one affects all of us.

Instead, we see that our spiritual family needs our biological family, and our biological family needs our spiritual family.

It can be a great blessing to be involved in the physical family life of others.

When we think about it, hospitality is a profound expression of what the gospel is. It reflects exactly what God has done for us.

In other words, we have all been saved by divine hospitality. We were far away from God but have now been brought into his presence, into his very household. God has taken us in and seated us at his table. And he has done all this through the blood of Christ. He was forsaken and left out so that we could be folded in.

This is the way God designed it to be: the physical and spiritual families we belong to need each other.

Again, Paul compresses big truth into the space of few words. (Paul would have been great on Twitter.)

But if any parent had cause to be called “blessed,” it’s Mary. She had all the regular joys of motherhood—a bouncing baby, the thrill of the first tooth and the first step. But hers was also a unique blessing. Her boy was no less than the eternal Son of God.

The One who filled her womb and then fed at her breasts was God himself. You can just imagine Mary’s Christmas family newsletter wiping the floor with everyone else’s.

So no wonder this nameless woman in the crowd calls out to Jesus in this ...

Jesus says there’s a blessing greater than that of a parent, even than that of being a parent to the Son of God. And that is to be an obedient Christian. If you hear the Word of God and keep it, you are more blessed than any parent of any child.

We’re all meant to be rolling up our sleeves and doing what we can to contribute to the ongoing flourishing of our species.

The church, like the family home, is a household.

At the end of the day, what the congregation most needs to hear is not the wisdom a pastor might have accumulated over the years as a husband or father but God’s wisdom revealed in his Word.

For kings, eunuchs were desirable servants because they had no heirs. They would not be able to establish any rival dynasty to the king’s.

God is so much smarter than we are.

This much is self-evident to just about everybody: we’re sexual beings, and our sexuality is meant to mean something.

But unless we know what our sexuality is for, we won’t understand how it is meant to be used.

God is the master conductor, bringing in each section of the orchestra and adding it to the symphony of creation.

Rather than God simply announcing something into existence, there is a moment of divine deliberation.

God’s involvement in this particular act of creation seems especially personal.

The account concludes with God resting on the seventh day, showing us that while we might be the climax of God’s creative work, we are not the climax of creation itself; God’s rest and satisfaction is.

God, we discover, is not just a moral authority bearing down on us or a sovereign ruling over us. He is a bridegroom wanting to win us.

He has come as a savior, and this shows us what kind of savior.

As savior, he intends to be a husband to the people he’s rescued.

Given the unique dignity of marriage to reflect the gospel in this way, it is no surprise that so much of the health of a society depends on the health of its marriages.

The real marriage is the one we find in Christ.

God had shown himself to be a redeemer of his people, and embedded in his law are commands that show that he wanted them to be redeemers too.

Only a small mind can imagine that God’s promises and purposes are constrained by human life spans.

But the key point for us is the first one Jesus makes. There will be a resurrection—there will be a physical life to enjoy in the coming kingdom of God.

Outside of our relationship with Christ, we will be single.

The most fully human and complete person ever to live on this earth did so as someone who was single, and yet he called himself “the bridegroom.”

Like Jesus, we can live in a way that anticipates what is to come.

It is a way of declaring to a world obsessed with sexual and romantic intimacy that these things are not ultimate and that in Christ we possess what is.

The presence of singles who find their fullest meaning and satisfaction in Christ is a visible, physical testimony to the fact that the end of all of our longing comes in Jesus.

Our sexual feelings remind us that what we forgo on a temporal plane now, we will enjoy in fullness in the new creation for eternity.

Celibacy isn’t a waste of our sexuality; it’s a wonderful way of fulfilling it. It’s allowing our sexual feelings to point us to the reality of the gospel. We will never ultimately make sense of what our sexuality is unless we know what it is for—to point us to God’s love for us in Christ.

Marriage and singleness, as I hope we’ve seen, are both good gifts from God, ways in which we can experience God’s goodness, but in a fallen world they’re gifts that come with unique difficulties. Neither is easy.

Needless to say, things don’t turn out the way we always expect or hope.

The fact is, in all likelihood, singles need their married friends more than their married friends need them.

As a single person, my friends are a lifeline. They’re like family. They are the ones with whom I feel most known and loved.

God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace.

The point is that when we imagine all those worst-case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened.

“God doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situ...

All of us are deep waters; some of our fears go back a long way.

We’re complicated creatures. We can’t always get to the bottom of our insecurities and pains.

So it is a great comfort to know that God has searched us and knows us. He is able to see into us far bey...

All that we can’t understand about ourselves God is not only aware of but knows thoroughly and intimately. He knows my fears better than I do....

The only guarantee is that Christ will never leave us or forsake us. He is the only one we can be sure will stick by us.