Listening as we hear how Paul addresses the Church at Corinth concerning this matter. In one Corinthians seven, starting in verses 26, Paul says, Because of the present distress, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife?
Do not seek a wife. However, if you do get married, you have not sinned. And if a Virgin marries, she has not sinned. But such people will have trouble in this life. And I'm trying to spare you.
This is what I mean. Brothers and sisters, the time is limited. So from now on, those who have wives should be as though they had none, those who weep as though they did not weep, those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, those who buy as though they didn't own anything, and those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it. For this world in its current form is passing away. I want you to be without concern.
The unmarried man is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But the married man is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. The unmarried woman or Virgin is concerned about the things of the Lord, so that she may be Holy both in body and in spirit. But the married woman is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I'm saying this for your own benefit, not to put a restraint on you, but to promote what is proper and so that you may be devoted to the Lord without distraction.
Here's what Paul is saying about the advantage of singleness. In a nutshell, there are responsibilities you have when you're married that will affect the way you spend your life serving the Lord. And if you're not married, there's a sense where you are more free to pour everything in your life out for Jesus. You have relationship responsibilities whether you are married or single. But those responsibilities differ depending on whether you are married or single, because the Christian who is married the Christian who is married has responsibility to the Lord first and foremost, but they also have a responsibility to their spouse.
The Christian who is single has responsibility to the Lord and only to the Lord. They have no marital obligations. Now, a quick word to single parents. Here you have an enormous responsibility to raise your kids. If you are a single parent, you have to always factor in how your decisions affect your kids.
But your kids won't weigh in on the decision making process in your life the same way that a spouse would. When you're married, your time isn't your own anymore. Your money isn't your own anymore. Your life isn't your own anymore. When you're married, you become one with your spouse.
And that's not a bad thing. It's just that in a very real way, you can't serve Jesus the same way as when you were single. I want to give you a sneak peek into how this dynamic has looked in my life. Before I got married, I thought the Lord was calling me to be a fulltime missionary in Costa Rica. I had gone on a handful of mission trips to that country, and there gas is one particular trip where I went down for a little over three months.
For part of the trip, I stayed with some missionary friends of mine who lived on the edge of the jungle. One of them is from Kentucky and the other is from Costa Rica. So they spoke both English and Spanish in their home, which was helpful for me. The other part of that trip, though, I spent living in the city with a Costa Rican family that didn't speak a lick of English. I stayed with them while I went to school to learn how to speak Spanish because I needed to know how to speak Spanish if I was going to preach the gospel in Costa Rica.
He spent time with those who were far from God. He did this with a man named Zacchaeus. In Luke 19 verse one, it says he Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. There was a man named Zacchaeus who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but he was not able to because of the crowd since he was a short man.
So running ahead he climbed up a Sycamore tree to see Jesus since he was about to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down because today it is necessary for me to stay at your house. So he quickly came down and welcomed him joyfully. All who saw it began to complain. He's gone to stay with a sinful man but Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, Look, I'll give half of my possessions to the poor Lord.
And if I have extorted anything from anyone, I'll pay back four times as much. Today Salvation has come to this house, Jesus told him, because he too is the son of Abraham. For the Son of man has come to seek and save the lost. Now we can't do it exactly like Jesus did with Zacchaeus. I can't just go into the streets, into the cul de sac where I live, into my neighborhood, and look across my neighbor Bob and say, hey, Bob, fire up the Barbie tonight because I'm inviting myself over to your place for dinner today.
Can't do it exactly like Jesus, probably. But we can initiate relationships with those who don't know God yet. In another well known passage, we can see that Jesus was well known for eating with sinners, and he had one of the best nicknames that I could ever imagine for Jesus. He was called the friend of sinned. Mark, chapter two, verse 15.
While he was reclining at the table in Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who were following him. When the scribes who were Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinned and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinned? When Jesus heard this, he told them, It is not those who are well, who need a doctor, but those who are sick. I didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners might be difficult if you're an introvert, but the principle is not rocket science. Spend time with people who are far from God.
And so just to recap, maximize your relationship with God, with your natural family, with your supernatural family, and with those who don't yet know Christ. These are keys to minimizing loneliness in your life as a single Christian. And these are things that Jesus did so well, and we can look to him and walk in his footsteps. And I'm not saying that you'll never have to endure waves of loneliness washing over you, but when you are lonely, can you honestly say that you've exhausted all the realms of meaningful relationships that you currently have? You can wear yourself out in a good way when you see how much opportunity you have to not be lonely.
Okay, this brings us to lie number four about singleness. And the next fill in on your outline. Being married is better than being single. Line number four, being married is better than being single. No, being married is not better than being single.
Now wait for it. And being single is not better than being married. The Bible says that both are gifts from God. God has designed both singleness and marriage to be equally good, yet different. Kind of like the way men and women have the same value, but are different.
We'll look at the goodness of God's design for marriage in part four of this series. But for now we can see the goodness of God's design for singleness in the advantage single people have. As a single Christian, you can practically serve Jesus in a different way than a married Christian can a single person. You are able to give your undivided devotion to Jesus. This is what the Bible says.
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields because of my name will receive 100 times more and will inherit eternal life. This used to confuse me, but when the Penny dropped for me, it became one of the most beautiful realities of the Church for me. Jesus said, Everyone who has left brothers or sisters or father or mother or children because of his name will receive 100 times more.
Now Luke records the same scene in his gospel, but he adds the detail that this 100 fold influx of family members brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers will be added at this time, not some future time in heaven. How could one person have 100 mothers or 100 fathers? Or how could we have 100 brothers or 100 sisters today? This only makes sense when you realize that Jesus is talking about the dynamic of the Church family we are spiritually born into when we believe in him biological. Moms and dads who are now a part of the Church can be surrogate mothers and fathers to those who don't have any parents, or they can be parents to those who still do have parents, but maybe they don't have healthy relationships with them.
Or they can even be an extra parental influence to those who do have good parents. Because even if you do have a great mom and a great dad, they aren't perfect. So having many fellow believers in the Church who happen to be moms and dads meets a great need in the body of Christ that exists when people don't have a mom or dad anymore for a variety of reasons. And the same goes for our brothers and sisters too. In the Church, there are hundreds of moms and dads and brothers and sisters.
We have such a huge family. As Christians, it's so big that no one ever has to be alone. So, to the single Christians, invest in your relationships in the Church. Attend the service on Sunday regularly. Get involved and serve.
Be a part of a home group during the week. Enjoy organic, spontaneous get-togethers with fellow Christians. Don't dwell on your loneliness. Don't sulk or stew waiting for someone to initiate something. Put yourself out there.
Now, this is true for married couples. To married couples, open up your lives to your brothers and sisters who aren't married. This doesn't mean that married couples aren't allowed to go on double dates with just other married couples sometimes. But it does mean that married people have an opportunity to share their lives and their marriages and their families with singles. So married couples, make sure you get plugged into a home group.
Your single brothers and sisters need what you bring to the table relationally, and you need what they bring to the table for you. Again, Jesus did this so well, didn't he? He didn't just say that whoever does the will of the Father is his spiritual family. He lived that reality out. He called his twelve disciples, and he spent so much time with them.
It was like home group 24/7 for three years with Jesus and his disciples to maximize the relationships that you have in your spiritual family. And then number four, maximize your relationships in the world where you can what an untapped Avenue for relationships and a necessary one for all Christians. Spend time with people who don't have a relationship with God yet and build friendships with them. Leverage your life and take risks for Jesus to love them and to show them the love of God to be salt and light in their lives and maybe even lead them into a relationship with God one day. Again, Jesus did this so well.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you need to move back home in order to maximize the familial relationships that you have.
I'm not against that idea, but I'm not saying that it's necessarily the answer. You can reach out and connect with your parents or your siblings. You can get together for dinner and not just on Christmas and Thanksgiving. If they live out of town. You can call every once in a while or take the initiative to plan a visit.
Yes, but what if there are broken relationships in your biological family? Well, the Lord. If you're a Christian, the Lord is calling you to make peace. As far as it depends on you own up to any part of the brokenness, that's your fault and prayerfully. Consider how to address any issue that the other person is contributing to the fracture and be prepared to forgive them freely.
You may need to learn what healthy boundaries are in unhealthy family settings, but this is something that God's wisdom can supply you with. Yeah, but what if I don't have any biological family left? This is such a devastating reality for some people. A person can come to this place a number of different ways through death or abandonment or rejection because of the Gospel. All of these can Rob us of family ties.
So what can a person do if this is them and they have no biological family to speak of? This leads us to the next relationship that we can maximize it's the third one maximize the relationship in your spiritual family, which is the local Church. One of my favorite lines I've ever heard about the Church. It's so simple and it's so good. It goes like this.
The Church isn't like a family. The Church is family. It's the family of God. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ. The one relationship that survives eternally is the one we have as the bride of Christ to our beloved Savior.
The relationships that we all have as brothers and sisters in Christ are the ones that will not end. And these need to be cultivated as much as family life is cultivated. And because we are a family, that means that no single Christian should find themselves in a position where they don't have meaningful, life giving relationships in the local Church. We don't pick our biological family, and in a sense, we don't pick our spiritual family either. The scripture says that it's God who arranges the parts of his body as he sees fit.
He's placed you in the Church that you're part of. And we can see in the Scriptures that Jesus placed an incredible importance on the Church family because of a couple of passages where he spoke about it in the Gospels. In this first passage, I'm going to show you Jesus biological family comes to see him while he's ministering. We can read about this in Matthew chapter twelve, starting to verse 46, and it reads like this. While he was still speaking with the crowds, his mother and brothers were standing outside wanting to speak to him.
Someone told him, look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to you. He replied to the one who was speaking to him, who is my mother and who are my brothers? Stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. Jesus wasn't being rude or downplaying the importance of his biological family in these verses, but instead he was elevating the importance of his spiritual family. Jesus elevated the relationships that we share with the people who choose to make Jesus the center of their lives.
Jesus also says this about our spiritual family in response to Peter, reminding Jesus that the disciples had left everything to follow him. Matthew, chapter 19 Picking up in verses 28, Jesus said to them, Truly, I tell you in the renewal of all things, when the Son of man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve Thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
Believe it or not, when it comes to being lonely or not lonely, it's not marriage or bust. Okay, so what do you do if you're single and lonely? Is there anything you can do to cultivate a lifestyle that's chock full of meaningful, life giving relationships? Yes. I can think of four areas of relationships that should be maximized if you're single and this is true for every person.
So here's the first one. You want to maximize the relationship that you have with God. On one hand, I don't want it to sound like I'm throwing a timeless Christian cliche at you when I say that God's your friend and that you're never alone because he's always with you. I don't want to speak Christians to you and throw Christian platitudes at you if you're struggling as a Christian in the area of loneliness, I don't want to be like the person who comes upon another person who's facing a severe hardship in their life. And I don't want to skip along and say, oh, it's all good.
Don't you know what the Bible says in Romans 828 that it's all going to work together for good. Hey, so just cheer up. It's going to get better one day and then I would skip away. And I don't want this to come across like that to you. If you're lonely, I don't want to throw platitudes and cliches at you.
But on the other hand, I have to say this to you because it's true. The relationship that you have with God is a real relationship with a real person. God is a real, alive person and you can know Him and enjoy a relationship with Him. It's the single most important relationship you will ever have in your life by a long shot. You can deepen your relationship with him too, and it can get better each day, and this will go a long way in alleviating any loneliness you may feel.
How do you maximize the relationship that you have with God? The same way you maximize any relationship that you have with any other person quality time with them and listening to them and sharing your life with them. We do this with God by listening to Him speak to us through his word, speaking to Him in prayer, and setting aside time to each day just to be with God and to prioritize growing your relationship with Him. Jesus did this. He was so busy all the time, but the scriptures document that he would go out and find time to be alone with his heavenly Father.
Jesus was single, but Jesus was never alone. And if you're a single Christian, this means that you are never alone either. You might feel like it, but you're not. Number two, maximize the relationships in your biological family where you can when God said in Genesis Two that it is not good for man to be alone, he was not given a prescription for marriage to be the solution for every single person's loneliness. Adam was the very first human, and the Earth couldn't be filled with other humans unless Eve was made and given to him as a wife.
Because Adam and Eve were married and started a family, that meant from that point on, every person who would ever be born was born into a family. Therefore, no person would ever be alone because the family unit existed. God didn't design it so that every single person would be married, but he did design it so that every single person would never be alone. God gives us Family Now I know that nobody has a perfect family, and when it comes to your biological family, you don't choose who's in your family. Some families are good and some aren't so good.
Some individual relationships within the family are good, while others aren't so good. But the family you have is the family that God gave you, and these relationships are meant to have a positive impact on your life. Okay, but now for a couple of but what ifs, but what if you're a single adult who doesn't live at home anymore. Therefore, you don't experience those familial relationships in close proximity and with a high degree of frequency.
And Christians try to live every aspect of their lives according to God's good design. Christians believe what the Bible teaches about sex.
And according to God's design, sex is to be enjoyed only in a monogamous, covenantal marital relationship between one biological man and one biological woman. So that means that single Christian men and women don't express themselves sexually simply for the fact that they aren't married. But that does not mean that if you choose to honor God's design, your ability to flourish will suffer in the slightest. But that's not what our culture would tell you, is it? Don't let our culture trick you.
Don't let it form you into its mold. Because here's what the wisdom of this world sounds like. You have a natural urge, the s*xual urge. So it's natural to fulfill that urge. Anything less than that would hinder your ability to flourish as a human being.
Our culture says there's nothing morally wrong with doing something that feels good. Why would you withhold something good from yourself? And to me, that message just sounds like the exact same message that was preached way back in the Garden of Eden. It's preaching it all over again today. Remember, that fruit looks good, doesn't it?
Why deprive yourself of it? Go for it. Have a bite. What could possibly go wrong? What's the culture's answer to a single person who has a s*xual desire where it's very simple to our culture, find a consenting partner and have sex or watch porn and gratify yourself sexually.
Why suppress these natural desires you have if it feels so good? Why deprive yourself as long as it's consensual have as much sex with whoever you like. So what should you do with your s*xual desires as a single Christian person? Well, the answer is not to pretend that those desires don't exist. Understand your s*xual desires in light of God's word.
God is not against sex. Sex is his idea. He invented sex. It's a good gift. He created this gift to be enjoyed within boundaries.
And it's a good thing that can turn into a bad thing when it becomes the ultimate thing. So don't worship it. Don't idolize it. Don't believe that having sex, even in marriage, will solve all your problems because it won't deal with your s*xual desires the same way that you would any other temptation. Don't stimulate your desires.
Don't awaken them. Don't watch things that will turn the switch on. Don't hide it. Talk about it with trusted friends. Bring your desires and temptations into the light.
Abide in Christ, because the closer that you walk with him, the harder it is to give in to temptation. Okay, that's it for now. You can breathe. Sex is too big of a topic to cover in a single point in a message like this, and we can't say all there is to say. But I also didn't want to skip over the topic completely.
I just need you to know that your potential to flourish as a human being is not tied to whether you have sex or not. And if you doubt that again, just remember Jesus. Jesus flourished his entire life, and he was a Virgin his entire life. Line number three. Next, fill in on your outline.
Single people must be lonely. Single people must be lonely like they have to be. They don't have any choice in the matter. Married people aren't lonely, and single people are lonely. Now, that's a lie.
It's a lie that single people have no choice but to be lonely all the time. Now, some single people are lonely, to be sure, and some married people aren't lonely. But the flip sides are true for some other people. Some married people are very lonely even though they're married. And some single people aren't lonely at all even though they aren't married.
We have everything we were made for. We are complete. In him. Psalm 34, Ten says, Young Lions lack for food and go hungry, but those who seek the Lord will not lack any good thing. Jesus, in John chapter 1511 says, I've told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.
And Paul writing to Timothy in two Timothy, chapter three, verse 16, says, all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man or woman of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. God is the only person anyone needs in their life in order to be complete. With this logic, there are many married people who are incomplete. Why? Because there are many married people today who don't have Jesus.
And if they don't have Jesus, then they don't have God. And that would make any person single or married utterly incomplete. Maybe you still don't believe me. Now it's time for a case study in the Scriptures to look at a few single people who are anything but incomplete. We read about a woman named Anna in the early pages of Luke's Gospel.
Anna was married for seven years, but when her husband died, she remained single for the last 84 years of her life. Listen to what Luke says about Anna's life. Luke, chapter two, verse 37, halfway through, says she did not leave the temple serving God night and day with fasting and prayers. Now, if you're not a Christian, you might think this description of Anna's life sounds lame. But if you have the Spirit of God in you, then you know that there is nothing lame about Anna's life because it says she didn't leave the temple serving God night and day with fasting and prayers 84 years, she dedicated her entire life to enjoying the presence of God, and then she got to see the Christ in the flesh.
Anna was single. And from the very little that the Bible has to say about her, it paints a beautiful picture for us that she lived a complete life. We also know from the Bible that the Apostle Paul was single because when writing to the Corinthians, he said this about himself. Referring to his singleness in one Corinthians, chapter seven, verse seven, he says, I wish that all people were as I am. I wish all people were single like me, he says.
And we know much more about Paul than we do about Anna. Paul wrote the majority of the New Testament of the Bible. Paul traveled around the known world at that time, preaching the gospel and establishing the Church. Paul lived a robust, full, adventurous life where he poured all of himself out for the sake of Jesus Christ. Now, I don't have access to Paul's heart and mind, but when I read what he wrote in the New Testament, I don't come away thinking to myself, Poor chap, he seems really incomplete.
Too bad he wasn't married. Instead, I think to myself, wow, what a full and complete kind of life he had. And the Bible also talks about the only perfect person to ever live Jesus. Jesus was never married. Was Jesus an incomplete human being?
Because he wasn't. Jesus is abundant life. He didn't just come to give us abundant life. He is the very source of it. And he didn't need to be completed.
He is the one who came so that he could make everyone else complete. In Him, Jesus was the only perfect, complete human being who ever walked this Earth. And he was totally complete in his singleness. So if you were ever tempted to think that single people are incomplete, just remember Anna and Paul and Jesus line number two about singleness now and the next villain on your outline. You must have sex to flourish as a human being.
You must have sex to flourish as a human being. We're going there a little bit in this conversation about singleness, but what does sex have to do with a message on singleness? You might be asking yourself, Remember, we're talking to Christians about what the Bible has to say about singleness.
This topic is so important that we need to talk about some of it, even if it means we can't talk about all of it. So I pray that the Lord will take and use what's shared here to bless you. Okay, that's all the intro stuff. Let's jump in. Four lies that many people believe about singleness.
Here's line number one, and it's the first filling on your outline. Number one, a single person is incomplete because they are not married. This is a lie. Do you want to know who one of the biggest false teachers is when it comes to propagating this particular lie? He's been preaching it for years, since all the way back in 1996.
It's Tom Cruise. Technically not Tom Cruise, per se, but it's one of the characters that he's played in one of his movies. Jerry Maguire has perpetuated this lie for the last 26 years. The lie would he found in one of the most iconic scenes in that movie. It's the scene where Jerry walks in the door near the end of the movie and gives this speech to his wife, played by Renee Zellweger.
Dorothy is at home with a bunch of her girlfriends over when Jerry comes through the door. I'm going to quote Jerry's lines for you. Hello. I'm looking for my wife. All right.
If this is where it has to happen, then this is where it has to happen. I'm not letting you get rid of me. How about that? This used to be my specialty. I was good in the living room.
Send me in there, I'll do it alone. And now I just. I don't know. But our little company had a good night tonight a really big night. But it wasn't complete.
It wasn't nearly close to being in the same vicinity as complete because I couldn't share it with you. I couldn't hear your voice or laugh about it with you. I missed my wife. We live in a cynical world, and we work in a business of tough competitors. I love you.
You complete me, and I just. And then Dorothy chimes in, Shut up. Just shut up. You had me at hello and seen. So what's the message that's being preached in this scene by Jerry Maguire?
I'm not complete without you. I'm empty. There's this void in my life that only you can fill. But with you now I'm complete. Now I'm whole.
Now I'm satisfied. You are the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is my life. Sounds romantic. Just too bad it isn't true. This idea teaches people that one spouse completes the other.
And if this were true, and it isn't, but if it were, then by default, single people are incomplete persons simply for the fact that they are single, that single people are incomplete because they aren't married, that they need a romantic relationship for them to be truly human, to flourish. This is a lie that many people believe about singleness today. Now, with that said, I do feel I have to be straight with you. This concept is not totally untrue. There is a person that completes you, and this same person completes me.
And if you don't have this one person in your life, then you are incomplete. And this someone is a very specific person. And his name is Jesus. You do have a gaping hole in your life. But that chasm isn't designed to be filled by a husband or a wife.
It's designed to be filled by God alone. Jesus alone is the one who completes us. He is our very life. Because when we have Jesus, we have God. And when we have God, we have everything we need.
We have everything we were made for. We are complete. In him. Psalm 34, Ten says, Young Lions lack for food and go hungry, but those who seek the Lord will not lack any good thing. Jesus, in John chapter 1511 says, I've told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.
I'm going to be talking to the whole Church, which is made up of both single and married believers. I'm talking to the whole Church because both single and married need to understand this topic. I don't want married people to tune out during this message about singleness just because they aren't single. And I don't want single people to tune out during the message next week about marriage either, just because they're not married. If you are a Christian, you need to understand both singleness and marriage.
And there's a couple of reasons why you need to have a good grasp on both. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but there is the very real possibility that if you are currently married, you may not remain married for the rest of your life. That's not guaranteed to anyone who's married. And if you find yourself single again one day, you need to have a biblical vision for your singleness. And even if you are married until the day you die, you need to have a biblical grasp on singleness so that you know how to love and encourage and understand your single brothers and sisters in the truth.
And the flip side is true, too. If you are currently single, you may not remain single for the rest of your life. And I can hear the single people through the audio saying a big Amen. You may not remain single for the rest of your life. So it will be good to have a solid vision for what God's design for marriage is, if that is what he calls you too.
And even if the Lord doesn't call you to be married one day, you still need to have a biblical view of marriage so that you can encourage and support your married brothers and sisters in the truth, too. The whole Church needs to understand both singleness and marriage because we are all doing this thing called life together, and every one of us is either single or married. I always try to keep everyone in mind when preaching a message, both believers and those who are still exploring what the Christian faith is all about. But you need to know that in this message I'll be speaking primarily to believers about what the Bible teaches us about singleness. Some of the stuff shared here will get you laughed at if you're going to bring it up in the lunchroom at work this week.
Because Christianity, if you didn't know this by now, is weird in the world that we live in. It goes against the grain of what our culture believes and teaches. But unlike the culture that we live in, we're not taking our relational cues from what we see on TikTok or watch on Netflix. So with the Bible as our guide, we're going to cut through a lot of the noise surrounding singleness. If you're watching this message and you're not a Christian, I'm so glad that you are watching this message.
Just don't be surprised if you hear some very different ideas than the ones you're normally used to hearing when it comes to singleness. It's not lost on me that singleness can be a painful reality at times for a lot of people, both inside and outside the Church. It isn't always an easy topic for everyone, and social media hasn't exactly alleviated the situation. So I'm going to do my very best to be aware of that reality. As I talk about this subject with you, I want you to know that I am painfully aware that this message on singleness will be inadequate on a couple of levels, and that has weighed on me this week as I prepared it's impossible for me to address every single angle and every single aspect that exists surrounding this topic.
I want to talk about it all. I just don't have the time to do that in one message. And even the stuff I do talk about with you can't be exhausted the way that I would like it to be. So that means we're going to be flying pretty fast over some parts of this discussion. And if, as you're listening, the thought hits you, hey, he didn't mention this or he didn't address that part, trust me, I know that I'm missing it.
In this message we’ll identify 4 lies many people believe about singleness, and then tackle a question for the ages: How can I know if God has called me to be single or to be married?
As a Christian, I absolutely love the Bible. I know it as God's word and I love it as God's Word. I love what the Bible says. But you know what? I also love what the Bible doesn't say.
Take, for example, Jesus words recorded for us in John chapter ten. In John chapter ten, starting in verses seven, we read Jesus said again, Truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers. But the sheep didn't listen to them. I am the gate.
If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will come in and out and go out and find Pastor, a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance. So here's what it says. Here's what Jesus is saying. Jesus has come so that they in verse is may have abundant life.
Now who is this they that Jesus is referring to in this passage? Well, verses seven and eight tell us that they are of the sheep, and a sheep in this context is anyone who comes to Jesus. They in this passage is referring to Christians. So Jesus came so that all Christians can experience abundance in their life. Or if we use the title of our sermon series, Jesus came so that all of his sheep, every single one of them, can have a life that flourishes.
That's what Jesus is saying in John chapter ten, and it's awesome. But now I want you to notice very importantly what Jesus doesn't say in this passage. He doesn't say at the end of verse ten, I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance, except if they're single. If they're single, they can't have a life of flourishing and abundance and they are relegated to a second-class type of Christian life. Jesus never said those words.
Aren't you so glad that Jesus never said those words? He never said them in John ten. He never said them in any other part of the Bible. Jesus came to give abundant life to everyone, and this includes you even if you're not married. The abundant life that Jesus came to give us is not out of reach for the person who has known singleness their whole life up to this point and who will continue to know it the rest of their life.
The abundant life that Jesus came to give us is not out of reach for the person who has been married before, but now finds themselves single again, either because of a divorce or due to the passing of their spouse. However, which way a single person has come to be single, whether they have always been single or whether they have become single again after having been married, Jesus is not limited in fulfilling his words to them in John ten, where he States, I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance. We're in part three of our verse is relationships. And if you haven't figured it out by now, we are addressing the topic of singleness in this message. I'm going to expose four lies that many people believe about singleness.
And then I'm going to try to answer one big question that many, if not most, single people have. And the question is this. How can I tell if God is calling me to singleness or to marriage? But first, before we jump into those, I have some preliminary thoughts that I want to share with you on the front end. I'm not going to just be talking to singles in this message.
Maybe I've never turned my life over to you, Lord. Do that in someone's life today. Right now, it's simple. You have to be at the center, and you have to stay there. And so give us the Grace, Lord, that we need to have you in the center of our lives.
And then give us the Grace that we need in order to walk and to live and to plan and to order our lives around you as the center. And open up the windows of heaven and give us the blessings that we so desperately want to experience with you. And in the relationships that you've given us in our life. Heal those relationships, Lord, we pray. Bless them.
Fix them and show us how to be used towards that end. Glorify yourself in all of these things. Jesus we pray. Amen.
Not everyone will respond positively to your attempts at mending the broken relationship, but you're not responsible for how others respond. You are only responsible for your choices and your actions. Sometimes others will reciprocate your efforts and meet you halfway in the reconciliation process, and other times they won't. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what they do or don't do. You do the right thing anyway.
You pursue reconciliation if possible, as far as it depends on you live at peace with everyone. And we've just scratched the surface here. How to forgive and how to receive forgiveness really needs its whole, entire own message. I think we'll need to come back to this at some point in the future and spend more time here, because I am convinced utterly that unforgiveness lies at the root of so many of our personal problems today in the Christian life. But we just keep justifying our unforgiveness, and then we keep having brokenness Mark our life and our relationships.
So we'll have to talk more about that some other time now, because we're in the final stretch of this message, I'm actually going to invite Jeff to come back up. We need to be reconciled to God. We need to be reconciled to each other, and lastly, we need to reconcile others with God. This is the outworking of our text. In Two Corinthians, chapter five, halfway through verse 19, Paul says, and he, the Lord has committed the message of reconciliation to us.
Therefore, we Christians, we are ambassadors for Christ. Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God when we see brokenness in other people, especially in people that we have a relationship and in the people that we love. And we know that the solution to their problem is that they need to be reconciled with God. If they haven't had that happen yet, what should we do? We should let ourselves be used by God to point them to the reconciliation they so desperately need.
We should share the gospel with them. We should share with them what God has done to make reconciliation with Him possible. We should tell them about Jesus and invite them into relationship with Him so that they, too, can enjoy him at the center of their life and so that his life can begin to flow through them into all their various relationships as well. That's the pathway to relationships that flourish. You bow your heads and pray with me, Father?
I call it the Christian life. Life, the way that you designed it, it really is simple. It's just not easy at all. It's like impossible. It's simple.
You're everything, period. You're worth everything. You're the point of everything, Lord. Everything exists because of you and through you and for you. You're the designer, and you design this whole thing.
You rigged this whole thing for you to be the nucleus of it, the center of it, where everything revolves around you. And when it does, there's Shalom, there's peace and prosperity and blessing and honor and joy and purpose and meaning. It's really simple, but it's just not easy, Lord, because there's something in us that is broken. And we reject you. And we just think we know better.
We think we could do it without you or on our own way or on our own timetable, with our own methods. And we reject you. And then we wonder why things are such a mess.
I pray, Lord, for the supernatural work that has to take place in any of our hearts, in all of our hearts that says that our hearts begin to awaken and cry out to you and for you, Jesus. I want you at the center. Whether you've been at the center of my life for five decades, I want you to still stay there. Whether I've wandered for five minutes, Lord, I wander wander back to you where you're the center, whether I don't even know you yet. I have heard about Christianity and Jesus my whole life.
Maybe I've never turned my life over to you, Lord. Do that in someone's life today.
Can you imagine what kind of peace we would enjoy with each other if we never blamed anyone for anything ever again and we just owned our own stuff? With God at the center of my life now, I can claim the role that God has designed for me. I can find contentment and joy and purpose in my role. Husbands, you can reclaim the role of leader in your family and do it in a way that honors God and honors your wife. Wives, you can reclaim the role of helper in your marriage and do it in a way that honors God and honors your husband.
And with God at the center of our lives, we would never have to maim anyone in any way in order to make us feel better about ourselves. Why not? Well, because now we have a new identity in Christ. I'm not perfect, but this is so great. We have a perfect person living inside all of us.
I have a perfect person living inside me now and his name is Jesus and his perfection makes me right in God's eyes. I don't have to compare myself to anyone anymore. God accepts me perfectly on the merits of what Jesus has done and now I'm good in God's eyes all because of Jesus. And not only do I not need to tear others down so I can be lifted up because of what Jesus did for me, I can turn around and now do the same thing for others. He offered himself up to be maimed for my sake.
He was torn down so that I could be lifted up and blessed in my new relationship with God. Now I can choose to sacrifice myself in certain circumstances within my relationship so that those around me can be blessed. I can walk in Jesus footsteps. I can go low so other people can be lifted up. When mankind rejects God shame and blame and claim and maim are sure to follow.
But when mankind is reconciled to God, shame and blame and claim and name are redeemed in a way that glorifies God and blesses us in the relationships that we have with others, isn't that amazing? But this reconciliation doesn't end with our vertical relationship with God. Believe it or not, when we get reconciled to God, the reconciliation party is just getting started. Getting right with God is the first and most important reconciliation that we need. But just because we're made right with God doesn't mean that all of our other relationships are automatically fixed.
They aren't. The damage that exists in our relationships horizontally needs to be addressed. And the way that God provided vertical reconciliation in Him with Jesus or with him in Jesus serves as the way we can experience reconciliation in our horizontal relationships, too. Sin fractures our relationships. But Jesus is the means to reconciliation in our relationships.
So, here's the pattern that we see in our own reconciliation with God. See, God initiated the reconciliation process with me, and he initiated it with you too. God forgave us, and then we receive his forgiveness, and then we're reconciled. And if we want healthy relationships, we need to be the ones to initiate reconciliation where it's needed, like God initiated it with us. I need to forgive others when they've wronged me, and I need to be the one to ask for and receive their forgiveness when I've wronged them.
We need to be the ones to initiate reconciliation in our relationships where there is a fracture. This is what Paul instructs us to do in Romans chapter twelve, verse 18. Concerning this matter. He says, if possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
In Matthew in The Mount, Jesus also says this. He says, Blessed or happy are the peacemakers, not just the ones who enjoy peace. He's the ones who give themselves to constructing peace and bringing about peace. To initiate peace, you'll be the blessed ones. You'll be the happy ones if you pursue that end, but be prepared.
So, there's no scenario where we would receive Jesus into our life. And he's not the center of every aspect of it. He doesn't come into our life as a fringe, part time God. We are not reconciled into a relationship with God, where we pick and choose what instructions of his we will obey or disobey. The designer only comes in to be the center of the life he designed for us.
Do you want him like that? Then receive Him. Tell him your sorry for rejecting him and ask him to forgive you. And he will. And then spend the rest of your days learning how to follow Him.
This is how a person is reconciled to God the very first time. This is how someone becomes a Christian. But what if you're already a Christian and you're still experiencing some of the relational fallouts from the sin that took place in the Garden of Eden? What if you've been a Christian for a while now and you still experience some measure of shame and blame and claim and maim in your relationships? Well, a couple of things to consider if this is you first.
When Christ reconciles us back to God, God is placed in the center of our lives, and we begin to heal and our lives begin to come back into the rhythm that God has designed for them. It takes a lifetime to align ourselves with God's way of life. We can and we will experience a certain level of flourishing in this life. But we won't experience his life perfectly and fully until we get to heaven. We can have some now, but the full meal deal is still to come.
And second, when God takes his place at the center of our lives, our life is not set to autopilot. We have to choose to walk with him. We have to daily decide to do life his way. This is what the Bible calls abiding in Christ, and we don't always do this well as Christians. So what happens if God is in me?
But I choose to do some things in my relationship, so he says not to do. Will I experience blessing as a Christian if I don't obey Christ? Of course not. And if you find yourself in a season like this in any of your relationships, the solution is not to become a Christian all over again. The solution is to repent and turn that area of your life over to God's care and control.
And then we can begin to experience health there again, maybe for the first time in some instances. So how does receiving God into your life impact you and your relationships? Whether you're becoming a Christian for the very first time or you're coming back to him after some wandering? Well, here's a snapshot of how a reconciled relationship with God can influence how we deal with shame, blame, claim and meme. See, with God at the center of our lives, we have nothing to be ashamed about anymore.
Why not? Because everything we should rightly be ashamed about was taken by Jesus and paid for on the cross. We've been made clean, spiritually. My sins are gone, Christian. Your sins, they're gone.
Yes, I did those things in my life, and yes, I'm not proud of them. But those things aren't on my life anymore. They're gone. Praise God. This leads me to being able to share those things in various relationships that I'm in.
I used to hide that part of my life from others, but now I don't have to hide it from anyone anymore. I can be truly known by other people. That's one of the impacts of the gospel. With God at the center of my life, I don't ever have to blame anyone for my sins ever again. Why not?
Because the sins that I've committed have been forgiven, and any sin I commit in the future already has forgiveness secured for it. All I need to do is bring it to God and he's, like I got that one too. Dealt with it at all, with the it's covered all your sins in the past, all your sins in the present, and all in the future were put on the Son of God and he paid for them. All this means that I don't have to blame anyone in my relationships for the things that I do wrong in them. I can own my own stuff and receive forgiveness from God for it.
So in verses 18 and 19, Paul tells us that Jesus is the way that sinful mankind is reconciled to a Holy God. Jesus is the Means of Our Reconciliation Now I'd like us to take a moment to think about Jesus, and I want us to think about Jesus in light of the four things that have plagued us and our relationships because of our rejection of God. Let's consider Jesus through the lens of shame, blame, claim, and name, because when it comes to shame, Jesus didn't have anything in himself to be ashamed about because Jesus never sinned against God or anyone else for that matter. Jesus lived a sinlessly, perfect life. Jesus never blamed anyone else for his sin because you have to have sin in your life to blame someone else for it.
He never had any of his own sin to deal with, but he did end up taking the blame of others upon Himself. See, we are to blame for our own sin. But Jesus took upon Himself the sin that we all should have been blamed for. He took our sin when he was on the cross, and Jesus never wrongfully claimed a role that wasn't his as a kid, he honored the authority of his parents and submitted to them. And all throughout his entire life, Jesus submitted to the authority of his Father in heaven, even though Jesus was fully God too.
Listen to how Jesus describes the way that he lived in submission to the Father. John, Chapter 519 Jesus replied, Truly, I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Sun likewise does these things. And John 1249 Jesus goes on to say this, for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father himself who sent me has given me a command to say everything I have said. Jesus only did what he saw the Father do.
Jesus only said what the Father told him to say. It wasn't beneath Jesus to take the role of submission and to defer to the Father in everything. He embraced the role of submitting to the Father, even though that submission meant him going to the cross. We hear Jesus's famous words uttered in the garden of Gethsemane on the night he was betrayed. In Luke 22 42, Jesus said, Father, if you are willing to take this cup away from me, nevertheless not my will, but Lord, I'm going to submit to your will.
Yours be done, Father. And when Jesus came to the Earth the first time, he didn't come to maim anyone, even though humanity deserved to be punished for its sin. He didn't come to condemn the world, but to save the world. The world deserved to be maimed for its sin. We rebelled against the Holy and eternal and awesome God.
We deserve to die for our sin, but Jesus let himself be maimed in the world's place. We rejected God and deserve to be cut off from relationship to Him, both now in this life and forever in the next. But God loved mankind so much that he didn't want to give us what we deserved. So instead, the Son of God was given as a substitute for us. He was cut off so that we could be brought back into a relationship with God on the cross.
All of our rejection of God, all of our rebellion, all of our crime and treason against him was placed upon Jesus, and Jesus suffered the punishment for all of it in our place. Two Corinthians 521 says he speaking of Jesus became sin, and when he did, the Father Port out his righteous wrath against our sin on his Son, who stood in our place. Jesus was maimed to death on the cross, and he was buried. And on the third day he rose to life. Anyone who receives the resurrected Jesus into their life will be reconciled to God through him.
Jesus is the means of our reconciliation to God, and we can see how awesome he is against the backdrop of shame and blame and claim and name. Those things plague us, but against the backdrop, Jesus shines so bright. So how do you receive Jesus into your life if you've never done this before? Well, you believe on him. You turn your entire life over to Him, all of it.
You see, removing the designer from the center of the design caused everything to unravel very quickly. And if we're honest, we can testify that all of these issues have affected us and all of our relationships in some way, shape or form. These aren't just examples from a bygone era captured for us in Genesis three and four. These are things we know all too well of today. So that's the problem.
And that's the fallout from the problem. God diagnoses it for us in his would he reject the designer and the design falls apart. So what's the solution? I want you to think about this with me. If the problem can be pinpointed to the time in human history when mankind rejected God and then everything began to fall apart, then the solution should be the reversal of that event, shouldn't it?
If when we rejected God and our relationships began to fall apart when he was no longer at the center of our lives, then if we can somehow be reconciled to God and he is once again placed in the center of our lives, our relationships can begin to be put back together again. It's got kind of a Humpty Dumpty feel to it, and that's the solution. It's the beginning of it anyway. Mankind needs to be reconciled to God. So how do we do that?
How do we get reconciled to God? We're going to jump from the Old Testament and we're going to jump into the new and listen to what the Apostle Paul says about reconciliation in Two Corinthians, chapter five, verses 17 to 21. I put this passage on your outline. Here's what the Apostle Paul says to us, speaking of reconciliation starting to verse 17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away and see the new has come. Everything is from God who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the Ministry of reconciliation that is in Christ. God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God.
He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Now, a couple of observations from this passage. First, God is the one who reconciles us to Himself. We see this in verse 18. We don't reconcile ourselves to God.
He reconciles us to Him and thank God he offers us this reconciliation because when we rejected Him, he could have just let us have what we wanted. All of us wanted a life without Him at the center of it. And he could have said, Fine, do it. And even if we came to our verses and wanted to come back into a relationship with God, we couldn't do it if he wasn't a willing participant in our reconciliation. We can never demand that or force that from Him.
Hey, God, I'm back. Hey, remember me? I know I messed up pretty bad before, but can we try this relationship thing out again between me and you? I want you back at the center of my life right now. And if God was like, no, I don't think so.
You already had your chance. We'd be hooped. We couldn't make him take us back if he didn't want to. So good thing. Our reconciliation with him is his idea.
God knew we would reject Him when he made us, and he made us anyway. He made us with a plan already in place to reconcile us to Himself after we rejected Him. And that plan was Jesus Christ. Which brings me to the second observation from our passage in Two Corinthians five. And it's this we are reconciled to God through Christ and in Christ.
We're going to talk more about marriage in a couple of weeks, but for now we can see that because of sin we claim roles that aren't ours or we claim the right role, but in the wrong way. Now, a fourth follow up from sin that negatively affects our relationships. We maim each other. This is going to be the next feeling on your outline. Because of sin, we maim each other.
I hope it's obvious. I chose this word name because it rhymes with the other three words. And so here's a dictionary definition. If you don't know what name means, it means to wound or injure someone so that part of the body is permanently damaged. Again, we see this play out in the early pages of Genesis.
We can see this dynamic playoff between the first two brothers, Cain and Abel. Let me read this next passage for us. Genesis, chapter four, starting in verse, is the man was intimate with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, I have a male child. With the Lord's help, she also gave birth to his brother Abel.
Now, Abel became a shepherd of flocks, but Cain worked the ground. In the course of time, Cain presented some of the Land's produce as an offering to the Lord, and Abel also presented an offering, some of the first born of his flock and their fat portions. The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but he did not have regard for Cain in his offering. Cain was furious and he looked despondent. Then the Lord said to Cain, Why are you furious?
And why do you look despondent. If you do what is right, won't you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. His desire is for you, but you must rule over it. Cain said to his brother Abel, let's go out to the field.
And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Cain maimed his brother Abel. He maimed him so bad that he killed him. Why? Because his brother's actions were righteous and his weren't.
What was praiseworthy and able highlighted what was dishonorable in Cain. But why kill him over that? Well, if I look bad when compared to someone verse is have at least two options. I can change and do the right thing to like them. Or I could eliminate that other person and then I won't look bad compared to them anymore.
Now it's rare and extreme that a person would kill someone else like Cain killed Abel in Genesis four. So in what ways do we name each other in our relationships today? What would it look like for us, for any of us to be like King? Well, it would mean that anytime some weakness or bad habit in our lives is exposed by contrast to someone else's goodness, instead of dealing with our weakness or bad habit, we keep away from those whose lives make us feel defective. We don't kill them, we just avoid them.
Or worse, we find ways to criticize them so as to neutralize the part of their lives that was making us feel convicted. We feel like the best way to nullify someone's good point is to draw attention to their bad point. And it's in this way that we name each other. I will tear you down so that I can be lifted up.
Shame, blame, claim, name. We see these things affect human relationships immediately after mankind rejected God. We see this in just the third and fourth chapters of Genesis. And by the time we get to just Genesis six, we read this in Genesis chapter six, verse five. When the Lord saw that human wickedness was widespread on the Earth and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the Earth, and he was deeply grieved.
Woman is now going to try and dominate her husband, and man is going to try and dominate his wife.
She's going to try and claim a role in the marriage that isn't hers, and he is going to try and claim the role in the marriage that is his, but go about it in the wrong way. John Piper weighs in on this discussion in a clear and concise way. Speaking on Genesis 316, he says this, this is a description of the curse. It's a description of misery, not a model for marriage. This is the way it's going to be in history where sin has the upper hand.
But what is really being said here? What's the nature of this ruined relationship after sin? The key comes from recognizing the connection between the last words of this verse, Genesis 316, and the last words of Genesis four seven. In Genesis chapter four, verses seven, God is warning Cain about his resentment and anger against Abel. God tells him that sin is about to get the upper hand in his life.
Notice at the end of chapter four, verses seven, Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. The parallel here between Genesis 316 and 47 is amazingly close. The words are virtually the same in the Hebrew, but you can see this in English as well. In Genesis 316, God says to the woman, Your desire is for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
In Genesis four seven, God says to King Sin's, Desire is for you and you shall rule over it. Now the reason this is important to see is that it shows us more clearly what is meant by desire. In Genesis 47 says that sin is crouching at the door of King's heart and that his desire is for him. It means that sin wants to overpower him, it wants to defeat him and subdue him and make him a slave of sin. Now, when we go back to Genesis 316, we should probably see the same meaning in the sinful desire of woman.
When it says, Your desire shall be for your husband, it means that when sin has the upper hand in woman, she will desire to overpower or subdue or exploit man. And when sin has the upper hand in man, he will respond in like manner and with his strength subdue her or rule over her. So what is really described in The Curse of Genesis 316 is the ugly conflict between the male and female that has marked so much of human history. Maleness as God created has been depraved and corrupted by sin. Femaleness as God has created, it has been depraved and corrupted by sin.
The essence of sin is selfreliance and selfexaltation, first in rebellion against God and then in exploitation of each other. End Quote It was a long one. It was a long one, but it was a good one. You ever wonder why there could be so much tension in marriage? Well, it's a result of the rejection of God that took place in the garden and it is plainly shown to us in Genesis Three, verse 16.
It's the woman you gave me just turned this back to you, and if you didn't give it to me, there would be no fruit ending fiasco in the garden. Also, husbands take note of what not to do. Adam blames Eve. God, you're coming at me. She gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate.
So it's you and it's her. But this is not me. Don't put me on the stage, on the spotlight here. And then in verse 13, Eve gets in on the action and she blames the serpent. What have you done?
No, not me. The serpent. So God, each other and the serpent, but none of it is pointing at us now. It doesn't matter how they got to this place where they have forbidden fruit juice dripping down their face and the skin of forbidden fruit stuck in their teeth. It doesn't matter how they got here.
The fact remains, nobody forced them to sin against God. It was a free will decision of theirs. No one else was responsible for their actions. Satan didn't put the fruit in their mouth and physically forced their jaws up and down so that they chewed it and swallowed it. They made the choice to eat.
They chose to disobey, but then they tried to pass the buck after the fact. So what does blame reveal in a person's life? How does blame impact our relationships? Well, blame reveals a denial of the truth and refusal to own our parts in the problem. It's my fault.
But I don't want to admit that it's my fault, because if I can somehow show that it's not my fault, then I have nothing to be ashamed about and I have no responsibility to make things right. The person who's at fault is the one who has to make it right. And that person isn't me is you or someone else. We tell ourselves, and blame has a negative impact on us and our relationships because blame divides us. If the problem won't be acknowledged and owned up to whatever the problem is, then the problem can't be addressed and then the problem will never go away.
Now you have a problem in the middle of your relationship that's causing a divide, and you have a relationship that is constantly marred by division. When blame is the go to coping mechanism after sin, there could be no fixing a problem when there is no acknowledging the problem. Adam and Eve started playing the blame game after they rejected God in the Garden, and we've been playing the same game in our relationships ever since. Okay, here's your next feeling on your outline. Because of sin, we claim roles for ourselves that aren't ours, or we claim the right role in the wrong way.
This particular example of the follow from The Sin in the Garden takes place specifically within the confines of the marriage relationship. In a couple of weeks, we're going to spend a whole message on marriage. So I'll keep this point simple and focus on what we can see in only one verse. Really, only half of a verse is the last half of Genesis, chapter three, verses 16. After Adam and Eve sinned, God pronounced curses upon them in relation to their role in the sin.
He pronounced curses upon them in this order, the serpent, and then Eve, and then Adam. But we're going to focus our attention on what God spoke to Eve. So here's Genesis 316. It reads like this. He which is God said to the woman, I will intensify your labor pains.
You will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you. What does it mean that Eve's desire would be for her husband, but he would rule over her? God is not saying that she would have positive feelings toward him. Honey, I desire you so much.
I want you and I like you and I just want to be. I desire you. He's not saying that, and God is not saying that he would rule over her in a good general way as the head of the family. What God is saying in Genesis 316 is that one of the consequences of sin is that there would now be tension in the marriage relationship that wasn't there before the fall.
And here's the thing. We do the exact same thing today. When we are ashamed of something, we hide. We try to we hide from one another when there is something in our life that we are ashamed of. But we're not sewing fig leaves together to hide ourselves today.
So what does our hiding from each other look like? Well, we can hide from each other in a literal sense. We do this when we isolate ourselves and stop physically interacting with people in our lives. We reason like this. I don't have to feel ashamed around other people if I'm never around other people.
Now, we can hide from each other figuratively too. We may still put ourselves in positions where we are around other people on a regular basis, but we will hide the specific details about our life that we don't want anyone else to see. We just won't talk about it. We won't bring it up on our own, and we'll deflect or downplay or deny. If someone ever asks us about the thing that we're ashamed of and why do we do it?
Why do we hide when we're ashamed? Well, we believe a narrative that plays in our head over and over, and it sounds something like this. If anyone ever found out about this thing I did, then they would finally know what kind of a person I really am. And then no one would love me or accept me. I'd be rejected and alone forever.
We believe that narrative, and so we hide. And our hiding has a negative effect on our relationships. If we hide from everyone in our life, we won't have meaningful relationships with anyone in our life. The people in our life will get a version of us that we feel safe enough to project to them. They get the Instagram version of our life where everything is shiny and glossy and filtered and perfect.
They get half truths about us, but nobody gets the whole truth. The truth that includes my failures and struggles. No one gets that. The truth that the things I'm ashamed of actually affects me on a daily basis. They don't get that either.
And here's the irony. We're scared we'll lose relationships, that people know what's really going on in us, but because we're hiding all the time, we don't have any real relationships to begin with. I'm going to wrap up this point with a necessary nugget of wisdom when we're talking about hiding and sharing. I'm not suggesting for a second that we share all of the hardest parts of our life with every single person we know or to come into contact with. That wouldn't be wise.
That would be foolish. There needs to be a healthy level of trust with the people we share these parts of our life with. So I'm not saying to stop hiding everything from everyone. But what I would be curious to know, though, is that there is anyone who you share any of these things with, or do you hide at all from everyone? It's because of sin we have shame, and shame has negative ramifications on our relationships.
Here's the next filling on your outline. Because of sin, we play the blame game. Because of sin, we play the blame game. Whenever we blame someone for something, what we're doing is assigning responsibility to them for a fault or wrong that we have done. We've done something wrong, we're at fault.
But instead of accepting the responsibility for my actions, I'm going to try and pawn that responsibility off to someone else instead. And again, we see this play out in Adam and Eve's relationship in Genesis Three. After they sinned, we'll pick things up in verses eleven, then he God asked, who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man replied, the woman you gave to be with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate.
So the Lord God asked the woman, what have you done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So there are three examples of blame we can see in these verses. In verse twelve, Adam blames God. I hate the fruit, but guess what?
The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Okay, so what happened? They had the rules which weren't unfair by any stretch of the imagination.
God commanded them not to eat from that one single tree. The serpent came and deceived Eve, and then they did what God commanded them not to do. Eve ate first, and then she gave some to Adam and he ate too. And it was from that exact moment in human history that everything began to fall apart. If you're new to the Bible, you might be hearing this and thinking to yourself, that seems like a little bit of an overreaction on God's part.
You're telling me that they ate one piece of fruit and the penalty was that the whole creation was consigned to ruin? Yes, because eating a single piece of fruit wasn't the issue. The issue was that when they dismissed God's command, they dismissed God. They Dishonored God, they didn't trust God. They rebelled against God, they committed crime against God, they sinned against him.
They rejected him as the center of the design for their lives. And like when you pull on a loose string on a sweater, everything began to unravel. Adam and Eve's rejection of God broke something in them, and that brokenness has been inherited by every single human being since then, with one glaring exception, of course. And though our first parents were the conduits that ushered sin into this world and into our lives, we can't blame them. Only we can choose to have our lives revolve around God.
But when we don't choose that, we suffer the same kind of consequences that Adam and Eve experienced in their life and relationships. There was relational follow that came as a result from this episode in the Garden of Eden in Genesis three and four. We can see four specific ways that rejecting God has affected our relationships, not just back then. We can see how we experienced the same follow in our relationships to this very day. And so here's the first silly on your outline.
Because of sin, we experience shame in our relationships. Because of sin, we experience shame in our relationships. Here's what the dictionary has to say about shame. It says Shame is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. Can I ask you a question?
If you ever felt painful humiliation because of something that you did that was wrong or foolish. Would you want other people to know about what you did? Of course you wouldn't. Your first instinct would be to hide the thing that you did from others. I think it's very interesting that this is the exact course of action that we see Adam and Eve take after they sinned in the garden, they hit themselves.
So let's pick things up. In Genesis three, starting in verses seven, just in the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid. We see Adam and Eve hide in two ways.
First, we see them hiding from each other. They did this by hiding their nakedness from each other when they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. And second, we see them hiding from God. They did this by hiding behind some trees. Adam and Eve hid from each other and they tried to hide from God too.
God designed our relationships to flourish, and yet we all experience brokenness in our relationships. What happened? Why is there such a big gap between what God intended for us and what we experience in our relationships today? In this message, we’ll look back at where it all went wrong, and see some of the ways we’ve been experiencing the fallout in our relationships ever since. But don’t worry - we’ll also discover that God has always had a plan to fix everything.
We're taking a few weeks to look at and think about God's good design for our relationships. Quick show of hands. I just want to make sure that I'm preaching to the choir here. You want your relationships to flourish, right? Raise your hand.
Okay. That's what I thought. I just want to make sure that we're tracking together. We're going to pick things up from where we left off last week. If you missed part one of this series, you can catch up by watching last week's sermon online.
But since you don't have time to do that now, here are the Cole's notes from last week. God created the heavens and the Earth, and he designed them with the intention that every aspect of his creation would flourish. Every aspect. This means when it comes to our relationships, God designed them with flourishing in mind. We looked at five aspects of God's design for human relationships.
In Genesis one and two, we saw that mankind is binary, both male and female. We saw that man and woman both have the exact same value because both are made Amago day in the image of God. We saw that man and woman have different roles. That man was designed by God to lead and woman was designed by God to help. We saw that the family is God's plan for relationships that flourish.
And we daydreamed what our families and relationships would have been like if the events of Genesis Three never happened. And finally, we saw that God must be at the center of our lives if we want our relationships to flourish. The designer designed it so that he had to be in the center of everything he designed in order for flourishing to occur. And that brings everyone up to speed. And now we can ask this question, what happened?
Where did it all go so wrong? When did everything begin to fall apart? Why don't our relationships flourish today? Well, God pinpoints for us in his word, the exact moment in human history where we threw away God's perfect design for our lives and for our relationships. Remember, everything was perfect in Genesis One and Genesis Two.
It's in Genesis Three where everything goes sideways. So if you have your Bible with you, go ahead and turn with me to Genesis chapter three, verses one to six is where we're going to start. And we're going to see that Adam and Eve, we're going to see what Adam and Eve did that jacked up everything so badly for us. So let me read that passage for us. Genesis three, starting in verse, is now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, you must not eat it or touch it or you will die. No, you will not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman. In fact, God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
I just pray, Lord, that you would Minister to in comfort and bless the men and women in this room here who might have had any wounds open in their life, relational wounds open. Some people I know are going through stuff right now that is so painful. It's so searing what they're enduring, because we're not able to experience relationships the way that you design them to. And so I just pray, Lord, that your gentle touch would just comfort them. Would you speak to them and tell them?
And it's true that everything is going to be okay in you. It might happen in this life, but it might happen in the life to come. But you are going to right every wrong. You're going to dry every tear. You're going to bring comfort and wholeness and belonging to everyone you adopt into your family.
And it's going to be perfect. And not for a short amount of time. It's going to be perfect forever and ever and ever. But until that time comes, Lord, today hurts sometimes so would he comfort us and I also pray, Lord, would you make Gospel City Church a kind of Church that embraces the broken amongst us that we pray with and we support and we listen sometimes more than we speak and we're just there to cry with each other. And while all that's happening, let us also not celebrate the good things that you are doing in our relationships and that we'd be quick to turn all glory and all praise and all credits and honor to your name for working those good things in our relationships.
And so whether they're good or challenging, Lord, just be glorified in it all. Speak that to us, Lord, as we spend these next moments in prayer and worship and praise to you and all God's people said Amen.
They would leave when they got married. Genesis 224 says, this is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife and they become one flesh. According to God's design, the only reason you would ever leave, the only family you had ever known would be to start a brand new family with your husband or wife after you've gotten married. Otherwise, you'd stay and enjoy a perfect relationship in your family, regardless of how old you were. Remember, we're daydreaming here.
Don't freak out. We're daydreaming. Genesis One and Two this is a Genesis one and Two dream. But when you think about this dream, who is ever alone in this design? No one.
You are always a meaningful part of your biological family and experiencing God's blessing in it. Or you leave to start your own new family and your new family might only consist of you and your spouse. But guess what? You're not alone. There's two of you.
God rigged everything so that people were never to be alone. I'm personally convinced that when he said when God said in Genesis Two that it's not good for man to be alone, he wasn't saying that marriage was the solution for every single person's loneliness. Adam was the only one who existed at the time God said those words. But if things played out the way God perfectly designed them to, the first marriage between Adam and Eve would guarantee that no one would ever be alone again because everyone would be a part of a family according to God's design. Can you imagine that not one single person on the planet today ever experiencing loneliness?
God's design for relationships is not just good, it's perfect. Our fifth and final feeling is going to verse is a segue to next week's message. And it's this. You'll see this on the screen behind me. God must be at the center of our life if we want our relationships to flourish.
God must be at the center of our life. If we want our relationships to flourish. This is how God has designed everything in the world to work, and our relationships are no exception. The designer placed himself in the center of his design. If Adam and Eve kept God at the center of their life, if they honored him and trusted him and believed him and obeyed him, then our Daydream about how relationships would have been back then would have been our reality today.
All of our relationships would be perfect, and no one would ever be alone. But they didn't keep him at the center, did they? They rejected and rebelled against the designer, and the design fell apart. Genesis three eventually came after Genesis Two, and the fracturing of relationships ensued, the fracturing that all of us have experienced up to this very day. We're going to look more at what went wrong in our relationships next week, and we'll look at how God made a way that we can reverse some of the stuff that's gone wrong in them.
And so with that, I'm going to invite Jeff to come back up. We've covered a lot of ground in this first message tonight about relationships, and in this, I hope you weren't triggered too much. I hope you were able to see that God is good. I hope you're able to see that his design for relationships is good. I hope you're able to see that his design for everything is only ever good.
And I hope that you learned or were reminded how valuable you are as a person who's been made in the image of God. Bow your heads when you pray with me, God. We call you Father, because that's who you are. You revealed yourself that way, and all of your design is built around family. And then in the weeks to come, as we learn how we can experience what it means to be a part of your family and how that revolutionizes our life.
That we've all evolved from out of the role distinction between men and women is rooted in God's design for the way we are to relate to one another, and if it were to be done perfectly, it would lead to perfect harmony both in the home and in the world. So why do some people hate this dynamic so much that exists in God's design for how Amen and women are to primarily relate to one another? I think there are at least a couple of reasons. First, some people are confused about the idea that a person's value is not connected to what they do or don't do, so they wrongly assume that if a man leads primarily, and if a woman helps primarily, then the man must be more valuable than the woman. But I've tried to show you that this correlation isn't true.
Role distinction has no bearing on a person's value. Second, some people have experienced a gross distortion of the lead help dynamic between man and woman that was never meant to be experienced. Male domination is not Godly leadership. Women who hand feed men grapes and fan them in the heat of the day and do their bidding at their every whim is not Godly helping.
Sinful humanity has twisted God's good original design. All right, let's move on to our next filling. Number four. Family is God's plan for relationships that flourish. Family is God's plan for relationships that flourish.
We're going to Daydream a little bit here, okay? We're going to dream about what life would have looked like if Genesis Three never happens and sin never came in to fracture God's good design for relationships. Okay, Daydream time. Adam and Eve are married. In Genesis Two.
They would have lived in perfect harmony together. Perfect even with the role distinctions within marriage, believe it or not, then they would have had kids. Lots of kids. Remember? God told them to be fruitful and multiply.
That original family that began with just the two, with just Adam and Eve would have grown and grown as that first family grew. How would their sons learn what it meant to be a man? Well, they'd watch how dad led mom and the rest of the family. They'd watch dad as he led the whole family and fulfilling the mandates God gave them. They would watch how their dad treated their mom, and that's how they would learn how to be a man.
And how would their daughters learn what it meant to be a woman? They'd do the same thing. They'd watch how mom helped dad and the rest of the family. They'd watch how mom she helped their brothers and sisters in fulfilling the mandates that God gave them. They would watch how their mom treated their dad, and that's how they would learn how to be a woman.
And then the family would grow and everyone would be involved in completing the things that God gave them to do. Everyone would have a role to play. It would be all hands on deck. And because there would have been no sin in the world of Genesis Three never happened. The family would never get jacked up.
There would have been nothing in that first family that plagues all of ours. There would have been no betrayal, no abandonment, no abuse, gossip, slander, division, assault, discrimination, loneliness, regrets, divorce, foster care, orphanages. Nonexistent. In Genesis One and Two, there would only be Shalom. And this is what I meant earlier when I said that this could be triggering because it can be sad to imagine how awesome family was supposed to be and then look at some of our relationships in our own family and know how bad some of them are for us.
Back to daydreaming, according to God's design for relationships. The family wouldn't stay together forever. It would break apart, but in a perfectly good way. There would have come a time when a son or a daughter left the family. And why would a son or daughter ever leave the family if it was so good?
Eve wasn't there to receive that word from God when God said only to Adam in verses 16 and 17, you are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From the day you eat from it, you will certainly die. We know that Eve knew what the prohibition was because in Genesis three, when she was tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit, she referenced what God had said even though she misquoted him. Genesis three, verses two to three, the woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, you must not eat it or touch it or you will die. If Eve wasn't there when God gave the prohibition to Adam, and we don't see a separate instance where God gave the prohibition to her, then how does she know about it?
As far as I can tell, there are only two options. Either God reiterated it to Eve after he made her and it's just not recorded for us in the scripture, or Adam shared it with her, shared that information with her after she was made. And that's just not recorded for us in the scripture either. Can I tell you what I think? Okay.
I think Adam told Eve about the forbidden tree and they were not allowed to eat from it, and here's why. When they both ended up eating from the tree, who did God come to talk to about it? Did he come to both Adam and Eve because they both ate it? No, he only came to Adam. He didn't address Eve initially about it.
Why not? Because Adam was given the prohibition by God, and therefore Adam was the one who was responsible to make sure that Eve knew about it and that neither of them ate of it. It was Adam's job and responsibility primarily. He was to lead both himself and Eve in this way. Fourth, Adam was given a helper corresponding to him, not the other way around.
Eve was made to help Adam fulfill the task they were both given to accomplish. The scripture says that she was made by God specifically to be Adam's helper. Amen and women were perfectly designed to complement each other lead and help, and there is no indication that they were at odds over this role of distinction in the slightest. It's important to note that this leading and helping distinction exists specifically in the marriage relationship, and we know that Adam and Eve were married because of Genesis 224. But these role distinctions of leading and helping are also general parameters that should influence the way that men and women relate to each other in various nonmarital relationships, that we're all in, that men are designed to lead to influence the way that they interact in all of their various relationships between both men and women, and that women are designed by God to help should influence how they interact in all of their various relationships between both women and men.
We'll talk some more on how these role distinctions should affect our various relationships in the messages to come, and so we've seen some simple observations from Genesis one and two, remembering throughout it all that these two chapters record the only time period in mankind's existence when there was no sin in the world. This was sinless perfection. We see and learn things about God's design for the role of man and woman in creation in the sinless setting. And if we had the time, we could also look at the whole of Scripture and see that this role distinction between man and woman is maintained throughout the Bible is consistent regarding this topic. Different roles between man and woman is not an old, outdated cultural phenomenon of the Middle East from thousands of years ago.
Both men and women are made in the image of God, and God blesses both men and women, and he gave both of them the same Commission to be fruitful and multiply. In Genesis One, we were given the big picture overview of the creation account of man and woman, and it highlights the things that they share. But then in Genesis Two, Moses doubles back and he fills in the details of how this part of creation unfolded. And it's here where we're introduced to the distinctions that God designed between man and woman. I'm going to read a fair sized passage for us.
It's going to be Genesis, chapter two, verses four to nine and then 15 to 25. Back in our Genesis 126 to 27 passage, I had you underline the words they and them. If you want to keep your underlying game going strong, I'll get you to underline the phrase the man every time it pops up in these verses, I'm going to read, okay, Genesis, chapter two, starting to verse four. These are the records of the heavens and the Earth concerning their creation. At the time that the Lord God made the Earth and the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted.
For the Lord God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, but mist would come up from the Earth and water all the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he planted the man he had formed. The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We drop down to verse 15.
The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die. Then the Lord God said, It's not good for the man to be alone. I'll make a helper corresponding to him. The Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal and every bird of the sky and brought each to the man to see what he would call it.
And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, and to every wild animal. But for the man, no helper was found corresponding to him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place.
Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said, this one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This one will be called woman, for she was taken from man. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.
Okay, some observations. First, Adam was made. First, God could have made them both at the exact same time, but he didn't. And that alone, I think, is something just worth meditating on this week. Second, Adam was commissioned by God to do work before Eve was on the scene, Adam was placed in the garden by himself to work it and watch over it.
Adam was given the one given the charge to name the animals God had made. This was a task reserved only for Adam, and Adam even named the woman after she was formed. Third, Adam was given a revelation from God that we didn't see given to both Adamant and Eve back in chapter one. Back in chapter one, both Adam and Eve were commissioned by God to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it. But in chapter two, we see that only Adam was given the prohibition.
It was the Father who directed and sent both the sun and the Spirit, and it was the Son who, along with the Father, sent the Spirit. The Son was obedient to the Father, and the Spirit was obedient to both the Father and the Son. And while both the Son and the Spirit have and continue to carry out their roles in equal deity with the Father, they do so in submission to the Father. End Quote Can you see in this quote both the shared value and distinction of roles that exist within the Trinity? Why is it so hard for us to understand that man and woman could also have the same value as each other and also have distinct roles in their relationship with each other at the same time, especially in light of the fact that we were made in the image of the Triune God who has the same equality with distinction in himself between man and woman.
There is total and perfect equality, and there's also a distinction between them and the roles they were designed by God to fill. Before I tell you what the role distinctions between man and women are, and before I attempt to persuade you from the scripture that these role distinctions between man and woman are true and biblical, let's just take just a moment to acknowledge that there are several different positions that a person can take when it comes to understanding the role distinctions between man and woman. I put a diagram on your outline to show you the four general positions along this ideological spectrum, and everybody will find themselves gravitate to one of these four. A radical form of feminism will claim that women don't need no man, and women can and should do anything a man can do and probably do it better if we're honest.
Hey, wait a second, all right? You just outed yourself. Hey, you're welcome. At Gospel City Church, no matter where you land on this spectrum, Egalitarianism is a philosophy that says that men and women are in virtually all respects interchangeable and that their roles ought to have no relation to their s*xual orientation or Constitution. In complementarianism, men and women are absolutely equal in essence, dignity and value, but are distinct by divine design.
As part of God's good creative order, men and women are to have different yet complementary roles and responsibilities in the home and the Church. And here's a quote about hyper patriarchy from author Kathleen Brown, and she says this. What this means, referring to hyperpatriarchy, is that male figures, both in the home and in major societal institutions maintain dominance. The father figure exercises control over labor and property, s*xual access to his wife and the other woman of his household, and maintains the power to punish. So which one of these four positions do you find that you gravitate towards the most important rhetorical story but good.
It's important to note most local churches in the Tri cities where we live and where Gospel City Church exists. Most local churches and the TriCities would fall under the Egalitarian camp. Most churches at Gospel City Church, we believe the Bible teaches the complementarian position. And if you're ready, here are the rule distinctions. We believe the Bible teaches God designed man to lead and God designed woman to help.
And it struck me that if I was preaching this in the medieval times at this point is when I get rotten cabbage thrown at me in old tomatoes, when I would suggest such an idea. But we can see this truth consistently throughout all of the scriptures. But we're going to keep our eyes fixed on our first two chapters in Genesis. The first thing I want to show you in Genesis One and Two is actually a comparison between Genesis One and Two. In Genesis One, we already saw that God put Dominion of the animal Kingdom under both man and woman.
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Listening as we hear how Paul addresses the Church at Corinth concerning this matter. In one Corinthians seven, starting in verses 26, Paul says, Because of the present distress, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife?Do not seek a wife. However, if you do get married, you have not sinned. And if a Virgin marries, she has not sinned. But such people will have trouble in this life. And I'm trying to spare you.
This is what I mean. Brothers and sisters, the time is limited. So from now on, those who have wives should be as though they had none, those who weep as though they did not weep, those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, those who buy as though they didn't own anything, and those who use the world as though they did not make full use of it. For this world in its current form is passing away. I want you to be without concern.
The unmarried man is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But the married man is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. The unmarried woman or Virgin is concerned about the things of the Lord, so that she may be Holy both in body and in spirit. But the married woman is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I'm saying this for your own benefit, not to put a restraint on you, but to promote what is proper and so that you may be devoted to the Lord without distraction.
Here's what Paul is saying about the advantage of singleness. In a nutshell, there are responsibilities you have when you're married that will affect the way you spend your life serving the Lord. And if you're not married, there's a sense where you are more free to pour everything in your life out for Jesus. You have relationship responsibilities whether you are married or single. But those responsibilities differ depending on whether you are married or single, because the Christian who is married the Christian who is married has responsibility to the Lord first and foremost, but they also have a responsibility to their spouse.
The Christian who is single has responsibility to the Lord and only to the Lord. They have no marital obligations. Now, a quick word to single parents. Here you have an enormous responsibility to raise your kids. If you are a single parent, you have to always factor in how your decisions affect your kids.
But your kids won't weigh in on the decision making process in your life the same way that a spouse would. When you're married, your time isn't your own anymore. Your money isn't your own anymore. Your life isn't your own anymore. When you're married, you become one with your spouse.
And that's not a bad thing. It's just that in a very real way, you can't serve Jesus the same way as when you were single. I want to give you a sneak peek into how this dynamic has looked in my life. Before I got married, I thought the Lord was calling me to be a fulltime missionary in Costa Rica. I had gone on a handful of mission trips to that country, and there gas is one particular trip where I went down for a little over three months.
For part of the trip, I stayed with some missionary friends of mine who lived on the edge of the jungle. One of them is from Kentucky and the other is from Costa Rica. So they spoke both English and Spanish in their home, which was helpful for me. The other part of that trip, though, I spent living in the city with a Costa Rican family that didn't speak a lick of English. I stayed with them while I went to school to learn how to speak Spanish because I needed to know how to speak Spanish if I was going to preach the gospel in Costa Rica.